REverberations

It's all on again tonight at Tailors, Mary Street Surry Hills from 6:30pm. The pub rock covers band I'm in Jersey Kerb are back after a long break with a stack of new tunes and of course some old favourites you'll be belting out after a few schooners.

See you there later tonight.

After a year off, job relocations, house relocations... we have finally found some time to get back together and start practicing.

Wow!!! We finally worked out what the password to update the site was....


Our first gig back is this coming Friday
2 July 2010
at Tailors on Central
85 Mary Street, Surry Hills
from 6:30pm

We would love to see you all there...

We've just spent our first night in a new house. No, not our new house we intend to build, just a different rental property.

The one we moved into in December when our previous house in Picton was sold was a significant compromise. Given only two weeks to find a place and move out, we didn't have a lot of choice. But we were told at the time that the owners (one of who lives on site) were planning on selling it at the end of this year. So, this move was to preempt that while the newest little bubba is still inside, but also to get around the issues we had with the place.

The landlords were almost completely unresponsive, only wanting to do the bare minimum, and reneging on promises they made to fix the place up. Paying for 5 acres but only feeling we had the use of the house and immediate surrounds due to the landlady living (illegally) on site was another. Lack of garages or any external storage when we have two cars, a trailer, a ride-on mower and a caravan to store was starting to be a big hassle too.

So, we took the hit of pain and moved. We're back in Picton (well, north-west of it really) on 5 acres again, but this time with the landlords safely away in Sydney somewhere. The move was about as painful as you can imagine. Actually no, it would have been worse without the help of our parents - thanks to Margaret, Mum, and Dad (Happy Birthday!)

The owners had locked more locks than they gave us keys for, and then when we finally did get in the the place looked like a bombsite. It took three cleaners all day yesterday to make it acceptable. Not a good start.

But the setting is gorgeous - tucked in a valley. It's so picturesque that today AAMI are shooting a commercial there. Not sure if it's one of those dodgy driver ones, but if so then the approach road is certainly a good setting.

Hopefully this will have been an overall good move, and the last we make before we move onto our land.

One of the headline points that Tony Abbott has been spruiking in recent times amongst the rabble that is our collection of elected representatives is how Labour are getting us so debt-ridden that our future is destroyed and we are all doomed.

I don't claim to have found this by myself but have lost the source. Wikipedia lists countries by public debt. Basically countries at the top of the table owe way more than they are able to pay off easily and hence are at strong risk of what we've seen happen to Greece (#8) and Iceland (#11) in recent times. Australia is one of the the lowest-ranked developed nations at #107 and hence a long long way away from the predicted Liberal debt doomsday. We are very slightly more likely to be swamped by debt than China, the world's manufacturing powerhouse.

Here's some selected entries from that table:

Rank	Country	% of GDP
1	Zimbabwe	304.30
2	Japan	192.10
6	Singapore	117.60
7	Italy	115.20
8	Greece	113.40
11	Iceland	95.10
18	Germany	77.20
22	United Kingdom	68.50
42	United States	52.90
61	Switzerland	43.50
90	New Zealand	29.30
107	Australia	18.60
108	China	18.20

Years ago with one of my DVB TV tuner cards cards I unexpectedly also received a little USB IR receiver and remote. In common with almost all peripheral hardware, it was designed for Windows but can with a little effort be made to work with a linux machine, such as my MythTV machine.

I made it work by hand years ago, but then had no use for it for a while, and a few months ago wanted to make it work again. It turns out that Adam Pierce has a good set of instructions. But, like all other commenters on that blog post, my setup broke when upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04.

Grrrr.

I have finally found a working combination that hopefully will help others - the suggestions in the blog post were good enough to set me on the right track, but not good enough to make it actually work.

Here's the items that I had to modify by hand over and above my (upgraded) Ubuntu 10.04 setup:

1. It turns out that nothing makes the directory /var/run/lirc/, which is where lirc needs to put its socket. So, I have modified /etc/init.d/lirc to add this code block at line 109:
   

   if [ ! -d /var/run/lirc ];then
   log_success_msg "/var/run/lirc/ is missing, creating"
   mkdir /var/run/lirc
   fi
   

   
   lircd should then be able to start and create a socket called lircd within that directory.
   
   
2. Nothing creates /dev/lirc. This may not be needed but certainly some of the lirc testing tools expect to find it, so:
   

   cd /dev
   ln -s input/by-id/usb-Twinhan_Tech_Remote_Control_1111111-event-if00 lirc

   
   
   
3. Nothing creates /dev/lircd. This may not be needed, as it is the legacy equivalent of /var/run/lirc/lircd, but I suggest linking it:
   

   cd /dev
   ln -s /var/run/lirc/lircd

   
   
   
4. You need to modify /usr/share/hal/fdi/preprobe/20thirdparty/lirc.fdi as per Adam's blog entry.
   
   
5. As other commenters have noted, the USB ID has changed and lirc needs to be aware of this, so modify /etc/init.d/hardware.conf to contain:
   

   REMOTE="Custom"
   REMOTE_MODULES=""
   REMOTE_DRIVER="devinput"
   REMOTE_DEVICE="/dev/input/by-id/usb-Twinhan_Tech_Remote_Control_1111111-event-if00"
   REMOTE_LIRCD_CONF=""
   REMOTE_LIRCD_ARGS=""
   
   TRANSMITTER="None"
   TRANSMITTER_MODULES=""
   TRANSMITTER_DRIVER=""
   TRANSMITTER_DEVICE=""
   TRANSMITTER_LIRCD_CONF=""
   TRANSMITTER_LIRCD_ARGS=""
   
   START_LIRCD="true"
   
   LOAD_MODULES="true"
   
   LIRCMD_CONF=""
   
   FORCE_NONINTERACTIVE_RECONFIGURATION="false"
   START_LIRCMD=""
   REMOTE_SOCKET=""
   TRANSMITTER_SOCKET=""
   

   
   
   
6. Lastly, and this is the bit that had me stumped, I needed to take the header block from the released lircd.conf.devinput, remove unnecessary sections, and modify it with the keycodes published by Adam's commenters, installed as /etc/lirc/lircd.conf:
   

   # generated by devinput.sh (obsolete 32 bit version)
   begin remote
   
   name devinput
   bits 16
   eps 30
   aeps 100
   
   one 0 0
   zero 0 0
   pre_data_bits 16
   pre_data 0x8001
   gap 132799
   toggle_bit_mask 0x0
   
   begin codes
   FULLSCREEN 0x0177
   POWER 0x0164
   1 0x0201
   2 0x0202
   3 0x0203
   4 0x0204
   5 0x0205
   6 0x0206
   7 0x0207
   8 0x0208
   9 0x0209
   RECORD 0x00A7
   0 0x0200
   FAVORITE 0x016C
   REWIND 0x00A8
   CH+ 0x0192
   FORWARD 0x009F
   VOL- 0x0072
   PLAY 0x00CF
   VOL+ 0x0073
   RECALL 0x0198
   CH- 0x0193
   STOP 0x0080
   PAUSE 0x0077
   MUTE 0x0071
   CANCEL 0x00DF
   CAPTURE 0x00D2
   PREVIEW 0x016A
   EPG 0x016D
   RECORDLIST 0x018B
   TAB 0x000F
   TELETEXT 0x0184
   end codes
   end remote
   

   
   
   The key names in the above file line up nicely with the ones in my mythtv lirc config, and are all-caps versions of what is actually printed on my remote.
   

All that, and just in time for my Logitech Harmony remote to arrive and have to start again.

For years now I've loved linux. I've met and spoken with Linus Torvalds. I've even made a pilgrimage to where he wrote it. For servers, and many desktop uses, there's nothing quite like it.

The core linux system is a beautiful thing. Through uni studies, attending several linux.conf.au events over the years, and personal interest I've studied multiple parts of the code, and even fiddled under the hood myself at times.

And yet every time it comes to upgrading my highly-customised home server, one or more things breaks horribly, requiring much of my time to fix. These days the distribution I run on the server is kubuntu - a legacy from when the system was also used as a desktop. This upgrade will hopefully be the last for years, as the latest 10.04 release "lucid" is a Long Term Support release, meaning it will be kept safe and stable for years to come. Good thing, given it's taken me a few weeks to get this far. Here's a log for those who are interested.

• X would start, but with only a small white window with no useful content. Looking into the logs, it turns out it was far from happy with the status of /usr/lib/libGL.so. Googling around and looking at symlinks, it turns out that the system of symlinks for such things has changed, only one package didn't get the memo:
  

  reverb@trane ~ $ sudo apt-file search /usr/lib/libGL.so
  
  libgl1-mesa-dev: /usr/lib/libGL.so
  
  

  
  Fixing this, there's a similar mess for libGL.so.1. All this NVIDIA-related rubbish is most annoying, but this server isn't going to get any new hardware for years at the current rate, and as such it has to work. It sure did just fine before the update.


• My IR remote control no longer worked. What a mess this was. Nobody online had this one sorted, and until last night neither did I. I think I'll post that separately so it can be of assistance to others trying to make this work too.

Linux is an amazing thing which is capable of complex setups well beyond that which most users would have, and all for free. That just doesn't mean that the complex stuff is easy when it breaks in new and creative ways. It would be a full-time job to keep up with the changes that have happened with this release. I've had to find this out after the fact and spend time patching it all up. I had hoped Canonical (maintainers of Ubuntu/Kubuntu) would be doing this for me, and on the vast majority of hardware-software combinations out there they do very well. I can just see as time becomes more and more precious in years to come that a service doing all this custom work for me would start to look very attractive. Especially when your setup looks like this:

• Dual-core intel something or other, 4GB RAM
  
• RAID5 using four 750GB partitions across 2x750GB, 1x1.5TB and 1x808GB SATA drives
  
• Custom-compiled afpd shares the RAID to the Macs in the house
  
• Backup to external USB hard drives, rotated off-site
  
• Uplink is ethernet to Airport Express which extends the Airport Extreme network at the other end of the house where the DSL gear is
  
• Downlink is to a network-attached APC UPS (through my ancient USB Ethernet adapter, no less!), which gets its address from the server using dhcp
  
• USB IR receiver receives commands from a Twinhan remote
  
• Two DVB tuners are connected via a powered antenna splitter
  
• A SVN build of MythTV schedules (using Shepherd) and records (from the tuners) live TV
  
• A SVN build of MythTVfrontend (although I've been trialling xbmc) displays recorded shows controlled by the remote out through DVI and SPDIF optical audio to my Onkyo HDMI receiver, then on to the 1080p TV.
  
• Mythweb (with modified PHP and apache configs) runs to allow TV scheduling from a web browser
  
• Boinc runs in the background searching for aliens and cancer cures. Seriously.
  
• Lots of other things like mail, NFS, etc. that a server normally does.
  

Should be simple to upgrade, right?

Our block is now powered! There's a pole up and a meter box containing a bunch of meters all reading 0000000 - just like having a brand new car with a zeroed odometer.

The box contains a power point so we aim to go and plug a kettle in or something shortly just to test it out. However getting that power to a more useful location is still quite a hard slog of trenching ahead.

As for working out what to trench to, we're going over many different plans, working with some builders and hope to have decided on something a bit more announceable soon. Right now we spend several days getting very excited about one thing only to find a dead-end. This has been the case for several months now, we'd all like something a bit more concrete to go with. At least we do all that dead-end-finding now, before we've committed any money to the options.

This Friday we are going to visit a current project of one of the most promising builders we have been speaking with - with luck that path may prove fruitful.

The big band I play with has a gig on this Thursday:

The Honeymakers is a group of 16 musicians, including a female singer, who enjoy playing Funk, Latin, Dance, Jazz and Popular tunes.

We will be playing music for you at…
Venue: PETERSHAM Bowling Club
77 Brighton Street Petersham
(02) 9569 4639 or www.thepbc.org.au
Date: Thursday 13 May
Times: 6.30pm to 10pm
Food: The Green Bowl Bistro offers great food
Cost: Free!! Although the bands will accept donations!

Kids are welcome
Why not book a bare-foot bowling session! See the club’s web site for details

The link over to the left goes to the almost-daily blog and pictures we kept during our Europe 2002-3 trip. When I moved webhosts I neglected to quality check it and have only just fixed a few little issues which were stopping the blog from working.

Also, the "Time Machine" which provides a quick link to a certain number of years ago today is fixed so that we can re-live our trip each day, but in a much cheaper fashion.

This is all custom code and today (or even when we went again for our Honeymoon in 2006) I'd do it quite differently, using flickr and/or one of the many online travel blogging services which did not exist in any form in 2002.

Two tweets landed side-by-side in my Twitter feed the other day, highlighting the difference between our current government(s) and optimal reality:

Have a quick look at the image to the right. It's from a Liverpool Champion story about Liverpool Council heavy-handedly enforcing a 10m from an intersection parking rule, violation of which results in a $197 fine. Here, two cars would be fined for not being greater than 10m from the intersection.
Do you, as a member of society, think 10m is warranted? Look at the silver car in the picture - that's the approximate position I parked my car within Liverpool Council's boundaries, from where I cycle to Parramatta on occasion. I don't have a photo or proof, but I believe I would actually have been further from the corner, but I'm not claiming to have been more than 10m.
For the same amount of financial penalty, I could have driven between 10 and 20km/h over the speed limit, an action which statistically impacts the safety of others. Unlike, say, parking 6m from an intersection.
Sure, I'll pay - it's the law after all - however I won't bother to pick small parking spaces anymore for my biodiesel-powered tiny 5L/100km car (last tank 5.3L/100km, including towing 750kg mower/trailer combo at times and driving "with spirit" at others) to fit now so that others can have the larger ones for their land yacht fuel-guzzlers. There were plenty of huge open spaces away from an intersection I could have parked in.
Bugger the rest of you people looking for parking spots, it seems.

Our neighbour asked us to get our boundary fence up as he wanted to start storing vehicles for his business on his land, so that was incentive enough to get that organised. We decided against doing the front fence at this stage due to the money that could be better used elsewhere, but even the process of getting two more sides fenced has been most exciting!

The pre-subdivision use of the land had a strange garden that we can't quite work out which stretched across our boundary, so the first task was to clear a path through that for the fence to run:



Then to get to the old wire on the rear fence, I had to hack huge amounts of overgrown grass and blackberries from the farm to our rear:


Once this clearing was done, a week or so later the most excellent fencers turned up and made quick work of getting holes sunk:



And posts in:



Liz even stopped by near a fresh post to show off her baby bump! :



A couple of days later, and we had 300-odd metres of fencing done - the side brand new and the rear rewired:



We happen to think the result is rather attractive:

Well we decided yesterday not to find the answer to that question whilst having our 20 week scan. It's not all that relevant in light of the news that all is 100% healthy.

At one point the sonographer had trouble getting a view of one of the baby's hands as it was behind the head. The comment was made that this is usually a parental trait. Moments later I discovered myself leaning on their comfortable couch watching the big-screen view of our next child, arm behind my head comfortable on the wall.

I've got some video to come once I edit it down, and also a "4D" (hate that name) picture that they did all as part of the excellent service. We have a printout of this to stare at, however for me at least it's still not very real that come August our family expands by one!

Phoebe knows that there's a baby in mummy's tummy, but hasn't really grasped what that might mean to her life we think.

Now of course I have to choose from twice as many baby names and come up with two short-lists!

We're spending a reasonably amount of time just mowing our block of land, and the associated bills with no real benefit are driving us to focus on saving to move on there!

The first structure went up some time ago - I built a compost bin! Compost is rather difficult to move between properties, so our previous two have been left with a nice supply thanks to all our kitchen waste. There wasn't much point doing that again, so a bit of research and time later, and our land was no longer 5 empty acres.

We've cleared some of the fallen trees and turned it into firewood, discovering our local wildlife in the process.

Not long after we purchased the block, there was of course the question of how to tend so much grass. The answer was served up courtesy of an eBay-ed large commercial ride-on mower (diesel to run on 100% biodiesel, of course!) which we collected from the Hunter Valley thanks to the impressive grunt of the VW and a trailer we decided to buy to do the move ourselves. Both of these have proved great investments, even with a bit of repair work we needed to do to the mower.

Starting this coming week our fencing starts to go up. The neighbor we are sharing the fence with unfortunately started the relationship off on a less-than-optimal note by reneging on a deal we had, however this is hopefully behind us now.

The neighbor on the other side is a far different story - it turns out I used to work with him back at Strathfield Car Radios 13 years ago! One of those real small-world stories, and enough to completely overpower the let-down of the other neighbour. He fenced his block with the help of his father who lives around the corner, running an olive farm. This means he can borrow farming equipment as needed, although yesterday he had broken his slasher. The fact that he was slashing at given he has sheep on there shows just how much the recent rain has made the grass grow. Our block has sure taken some mowing in recent times!

For the fencing we have to clear out a section of odd fenced garden that is mostly in our property but goes into the block next door which we want to separate ourselves from with the fence, this is tomorrow's task.

The back fence is somewhat intact so we've asked the fencer to keep what he can to help keep our costs down, and I spent some time clearing away the blackberries and other overgrowth from the farm behind us with another new piece of gardening equipment we're going to need - a petrol whipper-snipper (using our electric one when the nearest power point we own is 3-4km away was proving a little difficult).

We have decided for reasons of cost not to fence the front for now, instead waiting for a final decision on where our driveway is to go (there's a drainage ditch which if we are careful we can drive across but this won't work in the long-term for delivery trucks, etc.)

Once that is done, we're pretty much done with the first phase of our project - get land and boundaries established. After that, the next phase begins - Services - where we get power, sewerage, water, hot water and phone available on the block in preparation for the following phase. This will be when we put up the barn with kitchenette, bathroom, heating, etc., then back in the caravan we purchased as cheap bedrooms and kitchen that we can sell later (currently sitting outside our rental property), and move onto our land!

Current hopeful plan has us there in spring, after the new baby comes along. We could be there far earlier but have to pace our spending according to our earnings.

I have a flickr set called Build on Razorback where I'm putting pictures of the process, and am also working on a more specific website to showcase our crazy plans as they evolve.

I'm most excited to announce that Phoebe will have a little brother or sister come mid-August!!

We've just returned from the 12-week scan with an all-clear verdict, and as such can now stop biting tongues and being secretive. How exciting and amazing! The little wriggler was tossing and turning in mummy's tummy, arms and legs flailing - a family trait Phoebe has certainly carried out to the outside world with her.

Depending on how you measure it, we're either looking at the first or second week of August as the due date, although nature of course will decide that for us. Booked in for care at the small Camden hospital and birth at the larger Campbelltown hospital - hopefully in the Birth Centre again which we felt very comfortable with last time.

This is a great moment for us as a family, because just like many more people than you would be aware of, we have had two miscarriages before making it this far. Society doesn't have a place in polite conversation for such things, but all we really wanted was to talk to other people who had experienced the same and understand that it's all ok. I feel strongly that we should be mentioning it so that people know two babies didn't make it to the world, and such that others who experience the same thing can know they are not alone.

Current thinking is that we may not find out the gender this time around (last time we knew, but nobody else did), although such plans are subject to change at our next scan when we can find out!

Here's a belated Christmas post with some updates on our life.
Phoebe had a great time on Christmas day, exploring Santa's presents, and those from her parents, grandparents, and other great friends. Having our family together for the day was great - Phoebe really loves being around people she knows.
Favourite presents vary from day to day, but between boxes of Duplo, wooden train set, a play house, and piles of In the Night Garden books and a talking doll, there's plenty of entertainment.

The sale of our land has gone through - pics shortly - and as such we are now planning how to move on there and start building as soon as possible. Our current rental property being only five minutes away has turned out to be basically the only positive of it - the previous tenants' seven puppies appear to have left a legacy of an impressively robust flea population. These things are sent to challenge us.

Since we now own the land and are planning to get into temporary accommodation there quickly, we've decided not to do much unpacking here (hence the boxes in the picture). Exactly what form this accommodation will take is still up for discussion, but we may yet become trailer trash :)

Lots of recent pics up in the usual location.