Rants from Vas

Yesterday was simultaneously the best and worst day I’ve had working for ITG. It was the best because I just realised how good I’ve got it: I’m tuning applications for performance on Solaris – I really am doing what I enjoy at work. It just hit me that people when tasks are allocated, people actually get to choose the tasks that they’re most interested in. That’s not the most common scenario you’ll find.

But it was also the worst day so far, because it was the last day I’d be working with Bruce. I really do wish you all the best in what you’ve chosen to do, but selfishly I wish we didn’t have to let you go. We’ll all miss you, both professionally, because you have so much knowledge of the industry and company, and personally, because you’re a great guy to have around.

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With the baby almost here, one of the last things to get was a car seat. These things are not cheap, and I wanted to get the best solution. Being a geek, I actually went and read last year’s NRMA/RACV/RTA assessment of child restraints, and came to the conclusion that the Safe-n-Sound Compaq Deluxe gave the best trade-off for performance in rearward-facing and forward-facing orientations, and thus proceeded to purchase one. It looks quite impressive, and all the cushioning shoud make it comfortable for the baby. It also promised to be easy to install and ideal for smaller cars.

However, after installing it in my car (a 2007 Toyta Corolla Seca, which is called an Auris anywhere but Australia), I am quite dissatisfied. In rearward-facing orientation, the seat is not held down adequately. The “stabilising bar” is supposed to serve this purpose, but it doesn’t even come close to touching the seat back in my car. I think it’s designed to work in cars where the seat backs are close to vertical, but that doesn’t help me. I don’t think I’d trust it enough in that orientation to put a baby in it. In forward-facing orientation, it’s considerably better. The combination of the anchorage strap and seatbelt hold the child restraint in the seat securely both vertically and longitudinally. However, there’s nothing to stabilise it laterally, and there’s a lot of play in that direction. I don’t think it’s unstable to the point of being totally unsafe, but it leaves a lot to be desired.

Now my car is equipped with ISOFIX (ISO-13216 1990, aka LATCH) anchor points. This was actually a consideration for me when buying the car. I asked around about the availability of ISOFIX child restraints, and was told that they aren’t available “because they don’t meet Australian standards.” If that’s the case, then Australian standards are a joke. Attaching a child restraint to ISOFIX anchors is far more secure than trying to hold it in place with a seatbelt. The two anchors at the base of the seat effectively secure the child restraint both laterally and vertically, while the tether holds it securely against the seat back (longitudinally). ISOFIX has been a requirement on new cars in the USA since 2002. It should be a requirement here, too.

This experience doesn’t instil much confidence in Australian standards. In this case, it seems to be about protecting certain businesses while paying lip service to safety. Meanwhile, children’s safety is actually compromised.

OK, my pregnant wife was walking round the local park for exercise, when this African kid on a bicycle yells at her, “This is, my park, not yours!” She says, “Excuse me, the park belongs to everyone.” They abuse her some more and she says, “I’m calling the cops,” and does. They get scared and ride off. One of them falls off his bicycle and scrapes his arm, and he gets his parents and a whole bunch of Africans and tells them that my wife pushed him off his bike. The crowd round her and yell stuff like, “You’re going down, bitch!” and, “We know where you live.” So she calls me in hysterics.

Meanwhile, I’m in South Kensington. I manage to walk to Kensington and get a taxi to where she is (and overpay the driver for speeding) and the cops still aren’t there. When they finally show up, the bunch of Africans all tell the cops that my wife started it. The cops tell us they can’t do anything, because they’re just kids.

Now I’m really fucking pissed off and considering becoming racist for a number of reasons:

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Well, after several years of confirming that I don’t really want to be a software engineer (despite having l33t C and assembly skills), I’m a student again. And to all those people who think they couldn’t take going back to study after being in the workforce, I don’t know what you’re smoking – I’m enjoying reading notes, researching relevant literature, writing assignments and staying up late to cram.

It’s a pretty big change of direction from what I’ve done in the past: I went to uni to study something I knew I could do (electrical) and worked in an area that I knew I was good at (software). Now I’m studying something that I think I would enjoy doing. I’m doing an advanced diploma in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL). I’m also studying by correspondence with a private education provider. Wix and Rusty, back in high school when you told me I should be a teacher, I never thought it might actually be possible.

Oh, and I have two pieces of advice for anyone considering studying. First of all, paying full fees is a good incentive to do well, because you want to get something for your money. Secondly, this something I came up with, but it’s too cool not to quote: “three things are needed for study: time, space and a brain. If you don’t have the time, make the time; if you don’t have the space, make the space; if you don’t have a brain, go for a surf!”

Today I had the opportunity to work on an LG DVD/VCD/DivX player. You see, my little nephew Eric had somehow managed to get two discs into it, and it would no longer display anything. Plugging it in would just make some motors whir. Now you’re probably thinking that this is one of those stories where a guy takes a look at a broken piece of consumer electronics for a family member and then regrets it. But it isn’t. I wasn’t too keen on looking at it because of how wrong these things can go, but I was surprised.

Getting the top off the case was easy: just three screws on the back and one on each side. And then came the first surprise: the thing was actually designed to be easy to service! There in front of me were the four circuit boards and drive mechanism. The boards all had component overlays with marked values. The connections between boards were all labelled. The mechanism was plainly exposed. Now this shouldn’t be a surprise – it would be nice if all DVD players were made like this. But in this age of disposable everything, a lot of equipment isn’t made to be fixed (Sony and Pioneer, I’m looking at you).

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If you’ve actually visited the web page, you’ll see a new link in the sidebar - To Arcade. I’ve put up a few translations of Japanese game service menus and test programs. Tell me what you think. Also, I’m open to suggestions for more candidates for translation.

Incidentally, I’ve changed the look of the site a bit. I’m now using CSS to simulate the look of a frameset, so the sidebar scrolls independently of the content. The sidebar is automatically suppressed when printing, and the background of all the boxes is set to white, so I don’t need to create special printable versions of pages.

Oh, and the only browsers that seem to render the site properly are Firefox and Safari. Opera made it all look a bit weird, and I didn’t try Internet Explorer, but I don’t expect it would work.

Well, Mac OS X 10.5 “Tiger” has been released. As usual, it’s feature-packed, and goes faster than the previous release on the same hardware. And as usual, Apple has deprecated and dropped several legacy features. It seems with every release, there’s a little less of NeXTstep hiding under the covers.

In Leopard, Input Managers are no longer supported, and are severely restricted. Now I know why this is being done – there is great potential for Input Manager malware. Also, Input Managers were never suitable for system-wide input because they didn’t work with Carbon applications. But I’m sad to see them go. Mac-style Input Method components are a far less elegant way of performing the same task (albeit with far lower potential for evil), and the APIs Apple themselves use for writing new-style input methods still don’t seem to be documented on ADC.

The other thing that’s disappeared is NetInfo. It’s been replaced by Directory Services. I guess it’s time for us to learn to configure static hostname resolution, DHCP/BootP/NetBoot servers, unusual account settings, and all the rest of it all over again.

I’ve been using WordPress to power my blog ever since I started wasting time with it, and it’s been pretty good to me so far. However, there was something that bothered me: despite serving UTF-8 to the browser, the actual database table collation being used was latin1_swedish_ci. Now the way WordPress was getting away with this was by passing 8-bit UTF-8 text to the database server and telling it that it was 8-bit Windows Latin 1. This is very bad, as sorting and searching wouldn’t behave properly.

Now with WordPress 2.3, all that’s in the past. WordPress now seems to be able to do the right thing with text encodings. It’s just too bad the upgrade script can’t clean up the rot left from previous versions. After running the upgrade script, I found that every piece of Japanese text, every typographical quote, every accented character, in fact everything outside 7-bit ASCII, was horribly mangled. Now I had a number of options for going forward:

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Well, since everyone else seems to have an opinion on it, I may as well, too. First up, I wouldn’t buy one, for a number of reasons:

• I like having a mechanical keypad – say what you like, but you can’t use a virtual keypad without looking at it.
• I like being able to use Java MIDP applications.
• I can’t tolerate the lack of performance you get without 3G.

The iPhone isn’t a smartphone – it’s a feature phone. The defining feature of a smartphone is the ability to run user-installed applications, and the iPhone forbids that (it’s priced like a smartphone, though). Now if you want a smartphone, buy one – there’s no point buying an iPhone and trying to hack it. Apple doesn’t care about people who hack iPhones – they already have your money.

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Tonight, my wife and I decided to get out of the house for a bit. So we drove to Highpoint and walked around level one looking at the menus on display outside the eateries. We decided to eat at La Porchetta, as it’s quite good value, and I felt like eating a veal parmigiana. We placed our order, and waited, and waited, and waited…

After twenty-five minutes of waiting, we asked a waitress how our meals were coming along. She went off to the kitchen, and came back to tell us, apologetically, that whoever took our order didn’t put it in properly, so our meals weren’t being cooked at all. Now that’s pretty poor service, so we decided we’d go somewhere else.

But before we left, I thought I’d let the manager know that I wasn’t happy. And his response? No apology; no offer to make it up to us; just a justification. If he’d been nice about it, I might have forgotten the incident and come back next time I feel like pizza. But that just goes to show how little regard he has for his customers. Well, I won’t be coming back. Next time I want La Porchetta, I’ll go to Braybrook or North Melbourne. I’ll also go out of my way to let other people know, and encourage them to take their business elsewhere.

(Oh, and we ended up eating at the Pancake Parlour – the main/dessert/wine dinner package was quite good value, not to mention delicious, and the service was a lot better.)