Fuzzy - not just a name, a way of life

The tourist mecca that is the New Jersey Turnpike

2011-12-19T12:48:00.000+11:00

When I was young I dreamed of travelling the world. And it must be said that I've managed to live that dream, variously living and travelling in countries in pretty much every continent, from Andorra to Zimbabwe (well, two hours at Harare airport, if that counts).

Today, I furthered those wander-lust goals, by finally travelling to one of those places that you only ever hear of in movies, novels, and the occasional celebrity bio. That's right, today, I got to travel to... the New Jersey Turnpike. To be honest, the Turnpike wasn't the actual destination, but in passing Newark Airport, one can't help but traverse it. It was, um, er, well... underwhelming. The other parts of New Jersey that we passed were interesting (at least to those like us previously unacquainted with the state). The Hudson seems to have some kind of flood plain stretching west from Manhattan, on which the industrious Americans have built a bewildering array of rail yards and warehouse outlets. I got a wry smile out of the real estate signs proclaiming a particularly wet and frozen ditch as the ideal next shopping mall (or maul, as I prefer to think of them).

The good news is, all of this was to further our goal of furnishing our new apartment. Mr. Kamprad's Ikea has of course spread to the tax haven that is Elizabeth, New Jersey, and it was there that we found a few fire-engine red sofas, and all of those cleverly engineered mass storage cabinets that seem appropriate for an apartment the size of a postage stamp.

So that's New Jersey ticked off the list. Only 48 states to go.

Testify!

2009-06-21T22:27:00.002+10:00

In one of those strange quirks of life, I've been asked to act in an "expert witness" capacity for a technology contractual dispute that's just gone legal. So far, we're up to the bit where I provide sworn affidavits for the case. If I'm lucky, I'll get to appear as the hero in court, where I can say ridiculous things like "The truth? You can't handle the truth!". (Or the better version provided by Kelsey Grammer as Sideshow Bob in The Simpsons, "I deride your truth handling ability! No truth handler you!".)

Of course, it could also peter out in the mundane exchange of paperwork, but it's still an interesting process.

FA Cup, Scotch and Old Friends

2009-05-30T22:33:00.002+10:00

It's FA Cup night (OK, day in the UK, but as with most years, I'm on the other side of the planet - therefore, night). Many years ago, a Scottish friend would always run a scotch tasting night to coincide with the cup game. The best incarnation of this came one year sometime in the 90's, and involved tasting successively rarer, more mature, and much more expensive scotches, all the way up to the penultimate dram. Then, when we were all three sheets to the wind, and ready to watch the big game, Mark (my Scottish mate) "opened" an ancient bottle of something ... decanted it, and gave it to one and all to taste, declaring it the rarest tipple in the land.

We all proclaimed it the greatest scotch we'd ever tasted, and retired to watch the game. It only took a few minutes for Mark to burst out laughing, and dance around the lounge room with a bottle of 100 Pipers scotch, one of the most dire distillations ever created. Mark then took great pleasure explaining how he'd decanted this into the "ancient" bottle, and ribbed us all at our terrible ability to discern decent scotch. Most of us protested that after a dozen other rounds, we were in no shape to deal with his sleight of hand.

I honestly don't remember who won the game that night ... but the memory of being duped with the 100 Pipers remains. Tonight I've opened the bottle of Balvenie myself, to ensure no one has substituted it. It won't take long for me to forget who wins tonight's game, but the memories of the scotch will remain :-).

Oh please, no!

2009-02-13T15:02:00.002+11:00

Word has reach the real world from The Land of Flying Chairs, that MS is opening retail stores. I can imagine entire shopping centres exploding in a cloud of blue screens and red rings of death.

No.

Just, no.

A new year, blog clean out, and more

2009-01-01T14:28:00.002+11:00

Most people make new year's resolutions, but I seem to have been busy making all of mine in the last 3 months of 2008. I've started a Ph.D, been asked to write a second book, and came within a hair's breadth of moving to Ireland. It's enough to cover multiple new years' commitments.

The near-move brought out a latent desire to throw out a bunch of stuff, a la the Zen less is more movement. Previous intercontinental moves have seen me scan countless old documents, paper materials, etc., and then junk the hard copy. This time around, it was a little more hi-tech. CDs, DVDs? Rip em, or consolidate old CDs onto fewer DVDs. This still meant the yearly redundant backup hit 47 DVD's worth of data.

The cleanup also extends to blogs. About 3 months ago, I looked at the 200-odd feeds I read, and made a little script to plot their posting frequency. Turns out about 50 of them saw next-to-no activity in the time, so today is the day of the great blog cleanout. This leads me to a taxanomy to help diagnose imminent blog infarction, chronic blog sclerosis, and acute blog "non-entertainment-itis".

1. Blog infarction, aka sudden death. The signs of this one are obvious. Usually a slightly erratic posting frequency, followed by sudden, usually-permanent silence. The blog is dead. Attempts at CPR and defibrillation might bring the patient back, but this is rare, and even then often is the prelude to a latter, final repeat episode.

2. Chronic blog sclerosis. The hallmarks can take a little while to notice, as sometimes this masquerades as seasonal blog disorder ... i.e. the author taking summer holidays. The trend is confirmed when the number of posts withers from its normal pace, and ultimately only one or two posts a year are seen, perhaps with the markers of I-blogged-this-while-drunk syndrome. One treatment for this syndrome is "comment goading", but the sclerosis can be so pervasive as to affect the authors care factor for even deliberately provocative comments. Look for one word posts like "Meh" as a sure indicator of the condition.

3. Acute non-entertainment-itis. Collectively posting your banal twitters, ass-book profile, or the hideously spotty "week in links" marks you as having this disease. Stop it, you will go blind, and then I'll pour my beer on you when you can't see me. Often seen in conjunction with blog-whoring, a.k.a. milking other people's content for ad impressions, if you're doing this I hope your keyboard give you leprosy.

So having surveyed my feeds, the cull saw 51 sent to the bit bucket in the sky. Adios!

Not some kind of fancy breakfast

2008-10-22T10:29:00.003+11:00

Reading some comments on Slashdot today (yeah, I know, that's so yesterday, when I could be reading AssSpace, or SpaceBook or whatever it's called :-P ), I came across the word milquetoast. In the context where it was used, it sounded like an insult, but I thought I might be misinterpreting it. Maybe it was some fancy sort of breakfast, akin to French Toast.

But a quick check of various online dictionaries indicates it's a noun meaning someone who is timid, ineffectual and meek. Taken from the name of a 1920's comic strip character with precisely those traits. So, pretty cool, and I'll be casually using it in conversation to show off real soon now :-)

Bill, is that you?

2008-10-17T15:36:00.003+11:00

After fighting through the 30-odd different pages Microsoft makes you jump through to get to SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition (my advice is just go straight here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=90&p=&SrcDisplayLang=en&SrcCategoryId=&SrcFamilyId=265f08bc-1874-4c81-83d8-0d48dbce6297&u=http%3a%2f%2fdownload.microsoft.com%2fdownload%2f0%2fe%2f3%2f0e3532ff-d8dc-4ffb-b1ba-84542f08ec1c%2finstructions_enu.htm ), I got a laugh out of the fact it then used a Java app to control the 3GB ISO image download. Hilarious stuff. Please come back, Bill, without your blind zeal for substandard MS technologies, dangerous useful things are happening!

Outdated, anacronistic, discriminatory ... but our last, best hope

2008-10-14T21:07:00.002+11:00

The idea of an unelected, privileged few wielding power over the populous has always grated with me, mostly while I lived in the UK. But today I'm thankful for those very same people... one cannot defend liberty by removing it, and for once I'm glad to call these fine folk peers.

When Aristocracy is a Brand

2008-07-20T02:43:00.002+10:00

There's a thread running through The Guardian at the moment about the term chav. Is it derogatory? (almost certainly). Is it discriminatory? (almost certainly). Do the "poor chavs" deserve a more PC epithet, such as "consumption-challenged over-Burberried recently-rich-but-that's-OK". This led to a discussion over dinner, where I expressed my concern that any form of censorship is bad (language is just sound waves, which in themselves really can't be considered insulting), but which saw quite reasonable arguments made that some language causes grief and/or mental harm (e.g. insults over race, gender, etc). I acknowledge that, while still insisting that censorship is bad. And really, my beef is more about words considered "crass" or swearing, though often there's no convenient line between them, as what today might be a swear word may have begun 100 years ago as a form of verbal discrimination. I guess that leaves me in the "allow then punish" camp, rather than the "forbid outright" camp.

Anyway, getting back to the idea of the evening. If you consider the aristocracy as a business enterprise, then their centuries-old linguistic denigration of those they consider "lower" than them can be framed in modern economic terms. Fundamentally, if the core competency of the aristocracy is unattainable exclusivity (with the trappings that follow), then from a purely economic/competitive standpoint, they must protect that position through differentiation and other business defences. Thus, should anyone approach their position through acquiring or mimicking one of their competencies - say, wealth, or impeccable diction - then the core competency, and thus the business, needs to be defended.

A classic economic retort is to differentiate, and this is what I suggested the aristocracy do linguistically, when confronted with those attempting to move in on their territory. Own a few Bentleys and a Georgian mansion thanks to a lottery win? Well, one must be "new money", then. Daddy made his money working? Good heavens, what does that do to ones manicure? "New money" again. And in this day and age? Well, if one can buy all the (fake) Burberry, Louis Vuitton and La Croix one desires, but one mixes and matches said masstege with Adidas and and a bad David Beckham haircut, then one must be a chav. Voila! We have differentiation, a value proposition that the competition can't duplicate, and a business model that's good for another few centuries.

10 countries, 20 days ... no problem

2008-07-11T00:58:00.000+10:00

Er, travelling again. Just finishing up a stint working in Dublin. And I've discovered on valuable lesson. It rains in Dublin. It rains a lot! IT BLOODY BUCKETS DOWN EVERY F^#*ING DAY!!!!

OK, deep breath. Anyway, we're about to head off for a well earned break, and I realised that my little map of the world, on which I colour in the countries I visit, is about to get a workout. In roughly 3 weeks, we'll be doing:

Australia -> (Thailand if you count waiting at Bangkok) -> England -> Ireland -> England -> Belgium -> The Netherlands -> Denmark -> Sweden -> Finland -> Russia -> Estonia -> Denmark -> England -> Singapore -> Australia

After that, I'll need a holiday :-)

Reality Blur

2008-06-12T08:38:00.001+10:00

Was Larry Ellison really the inspiration for Robert Downey Jr's Iron Man persona? Bex thinks this is a case of rumour becoming a substitute for reality ... and Larry is the kind of shy, retiring guy who'd never seek gratuitous publicity like this :-)

The times when you wish Clippy was useful for something

2008-04-04T10:46:00.002+11:00

I'm currently managing several teams around the world. One of these teams is in Hyderabad, in India. One of the guys on this team lost many family members recently, in a tragedy of unimaginable proportions (well, at least I find it unimaginable, but I digress).

He and I had been exchanging some brief emails about his plans, and his need for time off (no surprise there, and I told him to take all the time he needed, not to worry about work, etc. etc.). I was writing what I hoped was a sincere message of condolence, when I glanced down to the standard signature block that my mail client is set up to auto-insert. And what did I notice? A smiley face.

That's right, a smiley face, that had I not noticed, would have gone out at the bottom of a message offering condolences for multiple deaths in this guy's family. Where the fuck was Clippy when I needed him?! You know ... why didn't he pop up and say something like:

"Hi! It looks like you're writing a letter of condolence, but you've added a smiley face at the bottom. Are you:
a) Some kind of fucking sadistic freak, who enjoys the grief of others?
b) Totally asocial, clueless, and suffering Tourette syndrome?
c) Just an insincere twat?"

While I'm relieved I spotted it, I'm also somewhat grateful I went through the near-miss experience. It reminds me there are things in life that should not be automated.

Thanks for the Odyssey, Arthur

2008-03-19T12:46:00.003+11:00

Another of the great Golden Age authors in Sci Fi is dead. Arthur C Clarke was one of the greatest, even if he had his flaws. I'm a little sad that we won't see the likes of him again. Sure, there are great authors in the field now, like Stephenson, Brin et. al. But there was always something special in the writings of those who lived through humanity's awakening to technology, and the promise and ideas that went with it.
Who knows where we'll find a mind like that again? Maybe under a funny oblong monolith on the moon :-)

What could possibly go wrong?

2008-02-01T17:01:00.000+11:00

I've done too many long-haul flights recently, and thought I'd experienced all the pain that airlines like Qantas, BA, BMI and others had to offer. This includes multi-hour delays, missed connections, and a large German man deciding to go into cardiac arrest by collapsing at my feet.

Today's flight from San Francisco capped them all though, and for once it wasn't the airline at fault. Flying into Sydney, we were delayed. The captain's soothing voice sounded out from the PA "We've had to abort our landing due to police action at the airport - nothing to do with us, but we'll be in a holding pattern until they open landings again".

A short time later, our charming captain added the all important causal information to his previous message. "Hi folks. News just in from the real world suggests it's not a problem with the airport itself. Rather, the police helicopter is being shot at from some nutter on the ground, and this just so happens to be right in the middle of our approach vector. We'll let them finish playing their games before we go anywhere near that."

I couldn't agree more. 15 minutes later, someone was obviously out of bullets, as we got the all-clear to make our approach, and landed only an hour late. Of all the things I could have predicted going wrong on the flight, dodging a shoot-out wasn't at the top of the list :-)

Rock climbing rocks!

2008-01-27T10:42:00.000+11:00

I'd never really given much thought to the "sport" of rock climbing. Sure, I've seen it done, including Jeremy Clarkson racing a bunch of free-climbers in a Top Gear episode. I'm visiting my team in San Francisco, and the opportunity came up to give rock climbing a go. And the result?

FANTASTIC!

It is seriously awesome fun, and I now have a belaying certificate to add to the pile of useless IT qualifications I've gathered :-). The best bit was using the auto-belay - like a giant inertia-reel seat belt, but with a "slow descent" option. It lets you climb the 15-to-20 metre wall, and then simply jump off backwards! That was cool!

Amazing coincidences

2008-01-25T17:11:00.000+11:00

What are the chances that you one day discover someone who

1. Has roughly the same nick-name
2. Travels as widely as you do
3. Speaks at conferences, UGs, and similar venues as often as you do
4. Enjoys food, restaurants, wine and the culinary arts to distraction ... just like you
5. Works for a leading Bay Area high tech icon, as you do
6. Has the same technology specialisation as you
7. Has the same laconic, humourous, chatty demeanor

Well, it seems fuzzychef.org is either the most eclectic stalker/doppleganger ever, or my long lost twin.

World Tour, Part 37b

2007-11-25T20:24:00.000+11:00

Well, it's that time again. The peculiar torture of airline internment, the inscrutable ramblings of French taxi drivers, and that feeling of "it's Thursday, it must be Prague". Or something like that.

To be honest, this trip should be good, as the work aspect will be fun, and the fun aspects include our favourite restaurant on the Petite Rou des Bouchers, beer with many old friends in London, as well as Heston Blumenthal's lesser-known culinary temple in Bray.

Scotland, Belgium, England and Hong Kong ... not a bad break :-)

Saturday Night

2007-09-10T16:55:00.000+10:00

Electric Reggae Warehouse Rave Party with lead Ukulele and Flugelhorn cameo. If that was too much for you, Barbarella on a 10m screen was also playing.

Trust me, you had to be there (and happy 50th, Pete).

This one's for Gord

2007-08-08T21:54:00.000+10:00

We waited weeks for the local music shop to get these, but they finally arrived. What self-respecting 80s-music wanna-be can call himself a real New Romantic without ...

A Black Flying-V Ukulele!

Soooooooooooooooo kewl! I'm practicing my Led Zeppelin and Metallica even as I type. We even got the special "extra bite" black strings to match. But wait, it get's better ...

... there's a pink version as well!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What can I say ... the boundaries of taste extend further than you could possibly imagine (or, I'm just a sicko :-) )

Dogs and Cats

2007-07-22T18:48:00.000+10:00

One of the many differences between our domesticated "brethren", is that dogs are significantly more omnivorous than cats. If any proof were needed, one need look no further than this morning's experiment in culinary delights by Polly and Sprocket, the dogs about the house.

Last night, a few marshmallows were consumed by the human inhabitants of the house. But the packet was left with perhaps a dozen or so soft, sweet morsels, uneaten but wrapped carefully in the original packet, on the coffee table. This morning, while I was busy elsewhere, the terrible burden of unwanted marshmallows was lifted from the house by our friendly canine helpers. Hyperactive dogs are a funny sight, and thankfully a long walk to the local park, with much running and ball-throwing managed to return their digestion to a natural equilibrium.

Dogs actually have a sweet tooth, something cats lack. Of course, Sprocket also has a ham tooth, bacon tooth, boutique Belgian beer tooth, and egg carton tooth. He'd make a great food taster, if that profession were still in vogue.

On the Philosophy of Beer

2007-07-07T17:26:00.000+10:00

An article I read today pondered how much lime one would need to add to Corona, before it could be considered a health drink.

Fear not, intrepid readers, your blog host will sacrifice himself to find an answer to this fundamental question of existence, that has plagued human kind since the dawn of time (or at least, the invention of that sweet, sweet brew). No lime will be left unsliced, no Corona left unopened, in my never-ending quest to discover the truth.

Day one, experiment one: One Corona, one 25g slice of lime ... mmm, beeeeeeer!

You, me, and lots of coffee

2007-06-30T18:43:00.001+10:00

What's it take to make you think you're alive? Not in the metaphysical sense, more in the "Ah ... that's the taste of life" sense.

I'm with Mike Lopp in having to have about 5 things on the go at once to even begin to feel like there's a little focus to things. Right now, that includes typing these vague ramblings, drinking my favourite Belgian beer, writing the book (it's eating all my time, but they keep promising me more money and more kudos), reading the latest wine "cleanskin" catalogue so we can restock the cellar, battling my Master thesis supervisor in his constant efforts to push me to do a Ph.D, and building a single-signon framework for a research institute that asked a friend of mine for help, who in turn asked me to sort out the "techo stuff".

And it's a Saturday night, so I'm taking it easy ... I've got a birthday gig to go to later, so I need to be fresh for that :-)

Blog Entropy

2007-05-31T21:33:00.000+10:00

LHS has decided to retire his old blog, and has started a new one. This made me think of numerous articles I've read over the last few years on the faddish nature of blogging, the ephemera about which people write, and the somewhat harsher critiques of the shallowness of blogging and bloggers.

What it also prompted me to do was work out why Gord hadn't updated his blog since February! It turns out, Gord has been as prolific, enigmatic and poignant as ever, but the crappy feed facility in Thunderbird didn't notice! Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

The serendipity was interesting, as two weeks ago, I spawned a "serious technical blog" to satisfy my sideline as wanna-be techno-geek, author and uber-consultant.

(And for the serious physics aficionados amongst you, yes I know that the blogosphere cannot (yet) experience entropy. That particular aspect of thermodynamics happens only to closed systems ... probably the most-often misunderstood characteristic of the 2nd and 3rd law. And it most definitely is not a closed system)

Maximum cool, minimum links

2007-05-20T20:56:00.000+10:00

Simon ponders why the travel blog that Karina and he have compiled during their recent trip hasn't garned more links. I have a quite sophisticated theory to explain why the veritable coolness of their adventures, the fantastic photos they took, and the travelogue they've shared correlates with their unexpectedly low inbound link count.

However, I lack the sobriety to convey this theory right now, so I'll summarise in a way that should communicate the thrust of my theory.

"WAAAAH!!!, WAH WAH WAH! BLLLEEEEAAAARRRRGGGG!!! I WAN'T THAT HOLIDAY! WAH WAH WAH. God damn Simon and Karina! Why can't I have eight weeks having a fantastic time in Europe. Stupid work, I was even in Europe at the same time ... but had to slave away at a hot keyboard. WAH WAH WAH!!!!"

So, I hope that provides some insight into the truly revelatory nature of my theory.

WAH!

Marketing 101 - Brands are King! Change them at your peril

2007-05-09T14:51:00.000+10:00

Inspired by an attack of active laziness*, I've been building slack configurations to automatically and silently build new windows and linux boxes ... yes, I'm just weird like that.

I've pretty much finished with linux world (the joys of apt-get, yum, etc) and am working on the windows side of things. Way down on my list of 50-odd things to install is my trusty old packet capture and analysis tool, ethereal. Or at least, that's what it used to be called!. While trawling through the vagaries of the lack of silent installer for the packet capture library (winpcap), imagine my surprise when I discover that ethereal has recently changed its name to wireshark. Wireshark! I shit you not ... I bet McKinsey graduates are crying into their Bollinger at the missed opportunity to charge $50,000 for that little gem!

It all came about when the original author went to work for commercial outfit with a small (though presumably innocent) conflict of interest, and all involved decided to "retire" the name ethereal. Kinda noble, I suppose, but nearly a decade of brand recognition and loyalty has come close to dying with the change. No doubt it's been suggested before, but a small bit of legal gymnastics could have been performed to gift the name to the ethereal project and protect it from future misuse, I'm sure.

(* active laziness: The calculated act of doing something to avoid having to do ten times as much in the near future).

Don’t let the bozo’s grind you down.

2007-04-25T07:49:00.000+10:00

So says Guy Kawasaki, who’s just wrapped up his keynote here at the MySQL Conference. He’s always an entertaining speaker, and to paraphrase him, I’m sure a thousand blogs have just bloomed with the impressions of the delegates here.

While the content of his keynote was interesting - open source, startups, how to be a hip silicon valley entrepreneur, etc. - it was his talent for a good speech that I enjoyed. He also used bugger all power-pointless, which is always a good sign.

Storm chasing

2007-03-04T23:31:00.000+11:00

A huge thunderstorm just rolled through Sydney, so I decided to try a little storm chasing. Some random observations:

Good points:
1. My Nikon D70 can take 2000 shots with a 1GB SD card set for high resolution
2. The rapid shoot feature enables around 20 shots to be buffered in on-board memory in a matter of seconds ... way cool.

Bad points:
1. Lightning is faster than human reflexes
2. You take a lot of shots to capture anything.

Here's one of the ones that wasn't black on black.

Reminds me of the Bruce Sterling book Heavy Weather - a good read. If I was being harsh, I'd claim it was shamelessly plagiarised in parts for the film Twister (though that had some basis in the lives of real weather reporters in the US).

This could be the start of a new career! Drive like crazy, watch cool storms, and get electrocuted by 20 bajillion watts of power unleashed in the blink of an eye. Oh, and there'd be beer :-)

San Francisco has ...

2007-02-04T18:49:00.000+11:00

Hills! Who knew!? I climed this one today in my travels

It's called Telegraph Hill, but I prefer to think of it as "Instant Pensioner Cardiac Ward Hill". The number of near-dead folks I passed on the way to the top was disturbing, but the view was worth it.

Wireless is the way of the f...[NO CARRIER]

2007-01-16T20:08:00.000+11:00

One advantage of having 20 or 30 notebooks at your disposal is you determine pretty quickly when something in the hardware/firmware/os/userland sucks. So my army of Lenovo / IBM T43p's have an interesting issue. Power on with mains power, and the 802.11g wireless works perfectly (under windows, and various linux distros). Power on from battery, and crapness sets in. No wireless ... right the way down to "Device ... what device?" kind of errors. I'm troubleshooting now - first under windoze - and even with the absolute latest patch thanks to a bunch of threads on the thinkpad forum (ThinkPad Wireless LAN Adapter Software v4.1.102.147) it still kicks the bucket at power on, returning a good old "Device failed to start (error code 10)" (or something like that ... the error code 10 is the key).

It sounds like some kind of quirky bios power saving feature ... if no mains, then cripple random part of the CPU. Meh ... I'll just get used to powering on with the power plugged in. Of course, the kicker is that I can pull the power plug as soon as the POST is complete and it works fine - so much for wireless.

Things in common

2007-01-08T14:52:00.000+11:00

What do Lighthouses and the English cricket team have in common?

Whitewash!

Seriously ... 5-nil! What the hell happened there? And it's not like the English team lacked talent. Here's hoping in 2009 they get their act in gear and at least put up a decent struggle when we beat them :-)

What do you mean this blog doesn't write itself?

2007-01-02T12:26:00.000+11:00

Apparently, I'm slack ... I've not written a post in two months. I plead extenuating circumstances, such as

1. Australia thumping England in the Ashes cricket (will some poor sod please teach the English how to play again ... another 20 years of Oz domination will be dull).

2. All things Googly (yes, ongoing cricketing pun intended).

3. My single-handed attempt to drink the country's wine supply. So far the score is Wine Supply: 1, Fuzzy: -liver (that being a perfectly reasonable imaginary number!)

So maybe I'll be less slack in future and blog more ... but then again, it's not like there isn't more wine to drink ;)

Great Googley Moogley!

2006-10-14T09:10:00.000+10:00

There's this little Californian start-up that runs a little online advertising and search gig ... you've probably never heard of it - Google. After a crazy recruitment process, it turns out I'm off to work for them. They'll be big one day - just wait and see ;-)

Dear LazyWeb

2006-10-10T07:50:00.000+10:00

Please fix recent versions of yum so that it works with MS ISA proxy authentication.

Yours sincerely
Fuzzy (oh, and the rest of the world).

(P.S. ... time's a tickin' by, so get busy).

España! Beberé a ése

2006-09-25T21:01:00.000+10:00

So those crazy Thrashers are off to Spain for a well-earned break. Half their luck! Wish I was going back there. Of course, seeing friends head off to somewhere you love makes you think "Hey, better start planning the next trip".

And of course, Dean and Paula choosing Spain as a holiday destination ... Beberé a ése! (with Sangria, of course).

Buones noches!

Getting Negative on Negativity

2006-09-09T23:30:00.000+10:00

Dean and Gordo raise an interesting topic on the concept of Negative Data. It was a cool idea way back when I first heard it, and then I did some quick descrete maths on the magnitude of what you'd have to do for any non-trivial data domain. The numbers are mind boggling. Want to just "not" store my name? Assuming a domain of 27 characters only (don't forget the space character), for my ten-letter name you need to store nearly 200 trillion "non-values". Fancy storing the name of one of my peers at school all those years ago - Srikanth Wirrawijuna Sivaramakrishnam - and you'll need to store 2 x 10^52 values ... yep, 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 values.

Of course, there are more elegant ways to represent the negative data, which reduce the data storage requirements. But I'd sure like to be in the storage business if this idea ever takes off.

Apparently, I might be Jesus.

2006-08-01T20:33:00.000+10:00

And for once, this isn't my ego talking (you'd know if it was ... it uses grand, sweeping jestures, and is sure that it's a 6'6" Adonis with several doctorates in brainy stuff).

My new colleague and partner in crime - he and I, plus a few others form the oh-so-hectic leadership team at my new employers - sent me an email tonight with this revelation (pun intended).

And I quote:

"We need to have a chat about your obvious “Jesus” status (!!!!)."

(yes, he used all of that punctuation).

Then he left me a phone message to the same effect, his boss had just called him wanting to know who this messiah was they'd just hired, and why his phone was ringing off the hook with people trying to get a piece of my time now they knew where I was headed.

I must say I don't feel particularly messianic. Nor saviour-esque for that matter. I did suggest that there may be problems with any such claim, not least copyright and trademark infringement lawsuits from the various other supposed son's of deities, and their spiritual and temporal arms here on terra firma. He didn't seem concerned at this, nor at the fact that being an atheist usually disqualifies one for such a title.

And besides, if I could turn water in to wine, there'd be a great many more typos in this post ... and lots of slurring.

Maybe I could be a Buddha instead :-)

Fun and profit with collective nouns

2006-07-19T22:33:00.000+10:00

My favourite collective noun of all time is a "Never-thriving of Jugglers". From time to time, collective nouns like a Murder of Crows take my fancy, but somehow I can't get past the descriptive brilliance of a never-thriving. And if you're thinking "who the f*#& has a favourite collective noun?" you're just jealous.

As for the profit, another collective noun comes to mind. An embarrassment of riches. I wonder who, exactly, was so embarrassed by their wealth to come up with this. Midas? Caesar? Liberace? (just kidding). Perhaps it should be me. At last count, I've had something like eight job offers in the last three weeks. And the associated riches are rather embarrassing. This of course doesn't include the potential offers yet to come ... but more on that later.

So, anyone for juggling?

If I have seen further ...

2006-07-08T22:40:00.000+10:00

... it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. Sir Isaac, that mad and brilliant fool, made this quip, and yet for anyone who marvels at the heights from which they survey the world, it surely is true.

Today, those very heights for me are a precipice from which I've taken an almighty leap. You see, I've just resigned. Some 10-odd years working for an idiosyncratic, dysfunctional, lovable, frustrating, quirky, stuck-in-the-mud, frenetic, fractious, eccentric, hide-bound, and ... ultimately ... transient little company. Some will pat me on the back as I leave, some will be happy to see the last of me, and a few will raise a glass and know that we had a blast ... for a while.

To complete the literary allusion that opened this missive, I have only been able to do what I've done by the grace of those who travelled with me on the way. It's churlish to name names, as I'm sure to forget some, be biased towards the recent, and in general make a hash of it. You know who you are ... and you know there's a cold ale waiting for you whenever you need it most; you need but ask :-)

Winter Solstice - time for a change

2006-06-23T11:54:00.000+10:00

Yeah, I got bored with "Blogger default no.1" template, so I've switched and started hacking. We'll see how far that gets. Amazing what the winter solstice will do ... all those hours of darkness, and all.

Of course, it's all relative. This is how "dark" it was out at Evans Lookout in the blue mountains.

and of course the more artistic version with the partial framing and leading lines.

Oh, and Jonron, it was about 18 degrees :-). I hear that was about what London was as well :-)

Those who fail to understand history

2006-06-20T21:11:00.000+10:00

are doomed to repeat it. Not an original line, but one that sums up this post. Tonight, while walking up to The Townie to get a bottle of wine, I saw one of Newtown's ubiquitous street light posters advertising "Sydney's first podcast network".

I laughed out loud at the utter failure of whomever was responsible for the poster to appreciate the death of walled gardens for content of any form, and the circular nature of history and culture. How can a podcaster, benefitting from several decades of revolution in broadcasting, content sharing, culture and consumption, possibly return to the point of thinking a prescribed, force-fed "network" of content has anything going for it that 1960's radio didn't? :-) Seriously, if this is a joke from the corporate cretins at ClearChannel, then that makes sense on a morbid-humour level. But something tells me that it isn't, and that these fiercly independent individuals will soon branch out into equally subversive measures, such as syndication, top-40s, and request nights.

Viva la internet ... and tear down the walls.

What do England and Japan have in common?

2006-06-13T21:49:00.000+10:00

They're both CHOKERS!!!!!!

First, The Wallabies absolutely hammer a hapless England rugby team ... clearly it'll be decades before they come close to the top flight of international rugby again. Even the Irish looked better in their defeat to the All Blacks. He he he ... Johnny Wilkinson will be crying into his latte :-).

But even better, the Socceroos fire home three goals in eight minutes to thump Japan, and set us up for the rest of the World Cup

If you like reading this ...

2006-06-05T21:24:00.000+10:00

... then you'll love reading my new book. OK, I'm joking - but only slightly. What's actually happening is a well-known publisher has approached me to do some writing - it may just be some articles, it may be a book ... who knows.

I've said "I'm interested", so we'll see what happens. In the meantime, I'm learning all I can about the process from those that have done this before.

New Zealand. Again. Crap.

2006-05-15T22:31:00.000+10:00

Sometimes I wonder how some companies stay in business (no, not my employer ... I know that's just sheer luck :-) ). I'm off to NZ again. Yet another "Oh my god, only you can save the world" gig. Like hell. How about "Any fool with half a brain can save the world, and I'm busy using my half-brain to soak up this alcohol thank-you-very-much!".

Mutter mutter mutter.

Fuzzy by day, chef by night

2006-04-17T20:38:00.000+10:00

After discussing with Lindsay some options for dinner tonight, I decided to invent a few things. First, porcini mushroom, red wine and spanish onion risotto ... which was great.

Second, chicken and proscuitto mignons stuffed with crumbed pistachios and garlic oil. Fantastic.

Third, red wine reduction sauce, also fantastic.

Put them all together ... and I'm now sitting on the lounge making vague groaning noises ... my god that was outstanding!

I shoulda been a chef!

On the dangers of Wives using the TV Remote Control

2006-04-11T22:34:00.000+10:00

So, tonight was a normal night at home ... until that fateful moment when the wine was finished, port had been drunk, and wifey decided it was time to bid goodnight to one and all.

As a "parting gift", she decided to randomly change the channel on the cable box to save me from the turgid show that threatened to waste precious photons after we'd watched yet another episode of Scrubs. One hundred and thirty-seven* button-presses on the TV remote later (*the real number has been changed to protect the innocent), and the TV ends up on ... I shit you not ... "I Love Carbuncles", on some derivative of the Discovery Channel. Even Dante didn't dream of this level of hell.

WTF!!!!???? Who the fuck comes up with shows like this? Who funds this stuff??!! Hell, I'll go take some pictures of a few carbuncles if you throw a few grand my way.

In the words of Grampa Simpson, I want Matlock!

Stilly admits to "Living in a cave" habit.

2006-04-05T22:16:00.000+10:00

He'll correct me if I'm mis-interpreting his post, but Stilly admits he's only just seen Blade Runner, and is only now reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

Dude, get out of the cave more :-).

That fluke of 3 years ago long forgotten

2006-02-26T21:38:00.000+11:00

It was a fluke at the time, and the English are scurying back across Hadrian's Wall tonight with memories of the world cup long forgotten. Those bonnie lads of Caledonia have spanked the hides of the pups from the south, to the tune of 18 to 12!

The Corries tune rings out tonight

"O Flower of Scotland,
When will we see
Your like again,
That fought and died for,
Your wee bit Hill and Glen,
And stood against him,
Proud Edward's Army,
And sent him homeward,
Tae think again"

Run home, English whelps ... no place for you amongst the world's best tonight, nor for a long time to come. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Google's Masterpiece! Nose Smile 1 through 12!

2006-02-22T11:31:00.000+11:00

If you're using google mail and chat, you'll know that it's a) great, b) great, and c) pisses off the network admins because it takes more than a Microsoft point-n-click to block it.

But did you know that it includes the pinnacle of Google development!? None other than ... Nose Smile 1, 2, 3, and so on through to twelve! WTF, I hear you say. It's the smiley replacement that google uses for the good old :-) emoticon. It looks like this when idle, and simple js mouse-over scripting lets it rotate through to this . Yeah, yeah, you've probably all noticed this before ... but I've only just seen it.

Small things amusing small minds, and all that. But it's the little touches that are so cool. And remember, this probably kept some of their 5000 PhDs busy for days

Jelly Nailed! What's next

2006-02-07T20:27:00.000+11:00

I ruminated about Nailing Jelly to the Ceiling previously, and in a predictable turn of events, I've just finished a stint in NZ where I did exactly that ... or rather, achieved the massive transfer rates the client needed from their migration effort.

It was fun, in a twisted, duct-tape-the-universe-together kind of way. I rediscovered my hate of long-term coding (after only a few thousand lines), and my enjoyment of breaking the brains of project managers who can't think outside the box (and I quote "That's not a risk! THIS is a risk!").

Time to find more jelly ... and more nails.

What Not To Code.

2006-01-17T17:09:00.000+11:00

There's a show from the UK called "What Not To Wear." Two somewhat bizare ladies (called Trinny and Susannah) discuss the how to torture others with their schitzoid fashonista expertise (and I mean that as a compliment).

They came to mind as I was writing a bunch of code to do mass database population for an enourmous Oracle-to-Oracle database migration that has some rather perculiar twists. (see previous entries on how to blow entire SAN storage boxes out of the water). I thought of the ladies of couture because I had just written (edited for funniness)

try
{
// some stuff to do with date logic and manipulation
}
catch (Exception badDateJuju)
{
// some boring error handling, roughly equivalent to "run for the hills"
}

It wasn't until I was checking for unhandled exceptions that I rememebered the name I'd used. "badDateJuju" ... at once both perfectly descriptive, but also totally cryptic. Certainly better than a bunch of code I've seen that uses "e" *everywhere* ... but it led me to think that some coding practice just shouldn't be allowed.

There needs to be a show ... hell, we'll make it a podcast, or video podcast, called "What Not To Code". Throw in a few geeks, poke fun at broken code (like that's hard), and give out the occassional "I Stole Bill Gates' Altair Basic and Therefore Am Responsible for Microsoft's Existence" award, and voila! We have a show! (OK, the pilot will tank, and it'll never be seen on free-to-air, but humour me here.)

Note to self.

2006-01-03T11:47:00.000+11:00

Don't complain when your mis-typed query accidently tries to insert 330 trillion rows, and blows the storage array. For once it probably wasn't Bill Gates' fault.

Cyclone season starts early

2005-12-26T20:46:00.000+11:00

As reported on Over the Falls, the whirlwind that is Cyclone Santa continues to track north over Oz. Here at Chateau Fuzzy, a half dozen friends gathered together to shelter from its onslaught. We saw first hand the wreckage it wrought. To wit, one dismembered turkey, ham, pudding ... and 25 bottles of wine. (Honest, we don't know how that last bit happened. Might have had something to do with the fact our christmas lunch ended up going for 11 hours. A record, even for us :-) ).

Fortunately, we were still in high spirits this morning, for our day on the harbour to watch the Sydney-Hobart start. And it was fan-bloody-tastic! Nothing like watching 100 yatchs tack madly to and fro in a box the size of a few football fields, and then bang! race on! If you haven't seen it before - do it.

Way to go, Mal

2005-12-24T20:47:00.000+11:00

Turns out my brother-in-law, Mal, has started hacking Ruby as well. And of course, in his usual style, he's already whipped up a script to help pick up girls. Way to go, Mal.

All in a day's work

2005-12-20T15:37:00.000+11:00

The lead up to christmas is usually slow - but not this year. Today (the 20th) is the first slow day I've had. And it gave me time to do a bunch of little things

First, I built two Solaris 10 virtual machines, which I'm now busy trying to get behaving on a host with limited RAM. (Yes, yes, too much time on my hands, I hear you say ... see para 1)

Second, I dabbled with some more coding of my data builder/stress tester/performance killer for doc management systems. I extended the utility to make PDF documents. Yeah, so what. Well, it makes 1000 per minute all with random titles and random content, and shoves them into the doc management system. And if I run 5 clients in parallel, that means I can load 18 million PDFs into the system every day. And I'm about to go on leave for 14 days ... so when I come back, I should have 250 million PDFs in the database.

(That of course will never happen. While the PDF engine is an excellent open source one, we are talking about my code - buggy to be sure, and Billy G's .NOT programming world will almost surely decide nothing is garbage, leaving me with no memory in a matter of minutes. Oh, and I'll run out of disk space ... even on my EMC SAN).

I wonder if I'll see the smoke from home?

Blast from the past.

2005-12-12T13:25:00.000+11:00

Adelaide Qantas Club. Usually that brings up thoughts of a tatty, crowded little room of forelorn and weary travellers, eeking out the passing hours waiting for Qantas to deign to open their flight. But not tonight.

I strolled to the bar to partake of the Qantas club's one saving grace ~ Coopers ~ and on the way saw an old but familiar face. John Mason and I had both enjoyed the trials and tribulations of engineering at UC, and here we were some 15 years later, older, wiser, but still happy to talk about old times.

We talked about how the degree we both did was once ranked one of the most prestigious computer science/engineering degrees in the country, and how it had changed to be an also-ran that last year was consigned to the dust-bin of academic history.

Perhaps most surprising was our exchange of anecdotes about our friends from the time, and what had happened to them. The usual moving, jobs, etc. etc. for most of them. Except Bill. Or (as I now know) Willamina as she prefers to be called nowadays. I think I spat beer half way across the room in surprise. Best of luck to him/her!

Funny how a disproportionate number a these posts are written in airport lounges. Probably just the combination of soothing [and free] alcohol, and more spare time than I'm used to.

Time for more Coopers ;-)

I Blame ...

2005-12-10T22:30:00.000+11:00

Gordon! ... for tonight's web design madness. If he wasn't forever revamping his blog, I'd be happy with the somewhat dull blogger template. But after his recent refresh, I thought what the hell, I'll get stuck back in to some web design stuff. So for a brief hour, you could have seen this site transformed with embedded CSS to squash all text to 2% normal size, using magenta as the colour, unless you were a lucky p tag with the id "spare me", in which case you got to be VERY big indeed.

Sanity has returned (and I seem to have collected adsense stuff along the way) ... let's see if I can make the design a little more pleasant :-)

Return of the Son of Broadband.

2005-12-06T20:51:00.000+11:00

Having dabled with iBurst wireless broadband, we've just switched over to iiNet ADSL2+. And the verdict? "Vrrrrrrrrrroooooooooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmm!!!!!!!!!!" Bloody fast. Lindsay's podcasts, that would take all night to download (OK, she was downloading a few hundred meg), now take a few seconds.

In fairness to iBurst, our house seems to be located in a "local anomaly", which meant even though we were within spitting distance of a hot-spot, we got shit performance. I took the box on the road several times (to the Sydney CBD, and North Sydney), and got much better speed.

Now, I'm off to download a few thousand copies of War and Peace.

The Ethiopians rule the world ...

2005-11-19T22:26:00.000+11:00

... or at least, their legacy does. Thanks to a funny little shrub that was native to the arid areas, the world got hooked on coffee. And my week has revolved around that little brew.

I've spent most of the week in a self-styled war room with a bunch of very smart chaps, one of whom comes from Canada. He and I got to talking about coffee, and he mentioned he was seriously impressed with the quality of the coffee here in Oz. He'd been expecting wall-to-wall Starbucks anticoffee, but instead had found every city block in Sydney is festooned with cafes, barristas, and frothed milk of the first order.

We started conducting an experiment - did all "large" cappuccinos by definition suck, due to the screwed ratios of shots-of-coffee to milk. Make a large cap with one shot, it tastes week and milky. Make it with two, and it's like an ash milkshake. (Hey, I've just reverse-engineering the secret recipe of every cafe franchise!)

In our huge sample of 6 coffees from 2 cafes, yes, regular is king!

The week wound up with me talking to a friend of mine about database problems she was having at work (the word having gotten out that I knew the pointy end of a Select statement when I saw one :-) ). Turns out to be the kind of problem that needs a little inspection (Oracle DB won't start, get's hung between startup and mount phases - I suspect a disk is dying and the symptom is presenting as intermittently unavailable data file. If they reboot, it will come to life most of the time, but is now taking more reboots ... never a good way to treat a database server anyway).

And guess where she works? A coffee company :-)

And then on to the weekend, where the quest to find the best flat white in Newtown continues. Today, the cafe was (and I kid you not) "Catfish Gotta Eat". Thankfully, they weren't making the coffee with said fish. My flat white ... OK. Lindsay's cappuccino was apparently excellent. Too early to tell - there are another 138 cafes and restaurants to check :-)

It's "Abrogated" Stilly ...

2005-11-07T21:43:00.000+11:00

... not "abdicated". Abdication is what Edward VIII did. Sorry, pet hate of mine.

iBurst'n my way to the internet

2005-11-05T23:18:00.000+11:00

Among the many ancient and mysterious brotherhoods of which I am a member, AUUG is one that is generally pretty good value. This week, as one of the perks of being Grand High Vizier (or something like that), I've got access to the iBurst that one of our sponsors has donated for a stint. And it's pretty damn good.

Of course, it's made even better because for me, it's free as in beer. But I'm now weighing up my options in my new abode ... where I can get ADSL2+ at 24Mbps (yes, that's not a typo, I've checked the DSLAMs in the local exchange, and I'm within the critical radius of a few hundred metres for peak transfer rate), at under $100 a month. A damn site better than the 2400 baud modem I first used to connect to a BBS twenty years ago.

I was tempted to wait for the WiMAX hardware that iBurst will be rolling out (thanks to $37m from Intel), but the recent field trials reported in New Scientist, /., etc show that far from getting the promised 70Mbps claimed, the real bandwidth will be typically 1.5Mbps ... yep, about as good as a 3G mobile.

Now if only I could get a "feed", as in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. My first selection? Beer!

Nailing jelly to the ceiling

2005-11-03T16:49:00.000+11:00

A client has been having an ongoing problem trying to retrofit migration into a rather large project. Seems nobody really bothered to plan too far in advance, and chickens are now coming home to roost. (I wonder if that means that chickens often roost elsewhere. Do they have roosting nightclubs, or roost-a-thons?)

"We're worried about the cost and risk involved." Well, yes, sensible really, as any good project manager will tell you. Risk - identify it, quantify it, mitigate against it, plan for life if it happens. (Sorry, I've just given away the whole ancient and mysterious brotherhood of project managers' secret handshake.)

"We're not happy we can import 10,000,000 thingos* into the system in under a day". No shit, Sherlock. You're talking 115 thingos a second ... not impossible theoretically, but you sure will need some serious lead in your pencil to make that happen.

(* the thingos are somewhat complex chunks of data)

"Can you come and do it for us?" Gee, let me see ... No f(&^$!!! way! Ahhh, that feels better.

Tomorrow, watch me turn this water into wine :-)

Fisher Price My-First-Country

2005-10-20T13:14:00.000+10:00

Or New Zealand, as some people call it. Having spent another week here, I'm growing to like the fact that there are no nutters trying to blow things up, Americans are unlikely to mistake the place for Kyrgyzstan and bomb the crap out of it in their typical genocidal approach to peace, and they serve Leffe ... the greatest beer ever made.

In the words of the locals, "Choice, eh?"

I'm back from the land beyond blogging ...

2005-09-24T22:57:00.000+10:00

... and what place is that? The "Oh for the love of god ... I'm so fucking busy" land. You know, where you move cities, start a new job, juggle moving all your worldly property, try to sell one house, buy another, help organise two conferences in two countries, almost take a trip around the world, complete a master's degree ... and drink a few dozen cases of wine.

All at the same time! So you'll forgive me for not having blathered and ranted on these pages in a while.

Just when you think things can't get more complicated, Gord discovers the Venn diagram of bad things, which I just know is somehow a secret map to the meaning of the universe. I mean, this is just weird. What (or who) is "Kreplach"? And why is Dante Aligheri so close to Hip Hop? Divine comedy it's not!

Bugger. Thanks to my own credo of "must know everything before I die", I have to go and find out about this "Kreplach" thing. He better have a bloody beer when I find him, or there'll be trouble.

Publicans and Publications

2005-09-03T20:00:00.000+10:00

Simon blogged a bunch of pictures of pub signs that he'd taken in London. Way to go, LHS! When I lived there, I used to collect pictures of cool pub signs. I've got about one hundred ... the best two being The Green Man on the A34 between Oxford and Nottingham, and Mother Shipton's at Knaresborough in Yorkshire. Must go and find the pics, and post them ...

Extreme Demos

2005-08-31T10:14:00.000+10:00

$40,000 for a robot assistant! That's what Gord and Stilly want for their keynote at our forthcoming user conference.

Ha! That's nothing. As the presenter of "The A-to-Z of Performance Tuning", it's obvious that I'll need at least $10+ million to afford the IBM blue-gene supercomputer necessary to demonstrate how lasers make everything better. Did I mention the 70m satellite dish? No? I probably forgot to requisition the legions of goons in dayglo jump suits. And the heroine in the bikini? The fleet of space shuttles? Oh, wait ... that's not my presentation ... that's the script to the next James Bond film :-)

The incredible tensile strength of ...

2005-08-28T20:51:00.000+10:00

... the "Designed for Windoze" label on my machine! I reckon we're talking 40 or 50 MPa. Plus a strong-binding glue, and a slick top surface (low co-efficient of friction - difficult to grip with the fingers). Where am I going with this? The bloody thing is almost impossible to remove from the computer chassis. Another bloody MS conspiracy, I say :-)

Everything you never wanted to know about IR protocols

2005-08-27T19:38:00.000+10:00

During the week, Lindsay bought an ancient Sharp Zaurus 5000 off eBay, and we've spent a few hours (OK, I spent 3 hours watching the cricket and troubleshooting) trying to get my somewhat futuristic Fujitsu ultra-lightweight notebook talking to the Zaurus over the IR port.

I've discovered several things in this time. Did you know there are at least 7 (yes, seven) IR protocols from the last 15 years. IRdA, ASK, etc etc etc. And you guessed it, the Zaurus will only speak one protocol (ASK), and modern PCs only have a clue about IRdA. And the only way to attempt to load ancient drivers for IR ports is to interupt the win2k/winXP installation process? Sooooooo ... this leaves me building a null-modem cable to plug into PCMCIA modem cards to build a link between the two beasts (which at least speak PCMCIA ... but not Linear Flash, oh no, Chairman Bill dropped that for Windoze 2k), and resurrecting the XMODEM stuff I used 15 ***years*** ago. If you know what I mean when I say "Kermit", you'll understand my frustration.

At least we found a web page from a guy who built his own bluetooth adapter for the Zaurus. In his own words "If your happy fabricating non-trivial ICBs, you shouldn't have any problem with this". I'll save that for after the "nailing jelly to the ceiling" episode.

Or I could just boot to linux and see what's possible there :-)

The Zen of defeating telephone sales cretins

2005-08-25T21:30:00.000+10:00

Poor Gord. He's just suffered from yet another telesales zombie calling him. A sales friend of mine (thankfully not in telesales ... just a normal sales droid) once told me great way to get at them.

The telesales thief-of-time will call, offering you the Joojanta2000 sunglasses (or whatever), and your first instinct will be to be polite (unless you've already gone postal - sorry, in that case I can't help you). Then you'll get pissed, and want the sales amoeba to just go away. Rather than be confrontational, or rant, or whatever, say something like

"That's sounds interesting, let me get a pen." (note - don't use language that could be construed as accepting their offer).

Don't wait for an answer - don't even listen as you say the words. Just put the phone down on the bench (don't hang up), and simply walk away. Sit down, have a cup of tea, play with the kids, whatever. The sales git will be hanging out for you to return, and they'll waste minutes - 4, 5, 6, maybe even 10 - waiting for you to return. They'll get fed up eventually, and probably will realise they've been had.

You get the satisfaction of knowing you wasted a shit-load of their time, and the worst they can do? Mark your record as "Do not call".

Simon, if you're reading, check your gmail

2005-08-22T21:59:00.000+10:00

The answer to your question on which Oracle login to use is there. (or at least, my best guesses, plus the way to find out for sure if I guessed wrong).

Thanks to Gord (and that Joel guy)

2005-08-21T21:00:00.000+10:00

Gordon gave me some useful suggestions for a domain name ... and with 5 minutes brainstorming, I had three sites registered (for under A$40 - not too bad). The one I'm running with at the moment is

www.grantondata.com

inspired by Gord's idea for a play-on-words with my name, and the success of Joel on Software, whom I read regularly.

There's nothing there at the moment (in fact, I'm only just setting up the redirect to my server), but I got a laugh when I thought of the obvious acronym. Grant On Data ... G O D ... mmm, perhaps my egotism knows no bounds :-)

Going out with a bang!

2005-08-21T20:03:00.000+10:00

And not a whimper. Hunter S. Thompson's last wish was to have his ashes shot skyward in a fireworks spectacular. And boy, did he go off in style!. Talk about living his own creed even in death - this is the epitome of gonzo journalism - be in the story, even as you tell it.

Thanks for the great tales, H., I enjoyed them.

Sherman and Peabody

2005-08-18T21:31:00.000+10:00

For those of you who missed cartoons in the 70's and 80's, this was the little dog and his boy owner, who happened to own "The Wayback Machine". And tonight, I set the controls for the 1980s, looking for the music that made me smile way back then, and once had me enter a competition where I named 1500 separate artists and groups from that decade (yes, I won the competition).

Sadly, the music industry goons who want you to be slave to their DRM anti-culture have failed to list anything before 1988. What about such great 80s music like Moving Pictures? Or Dream Academy's "Life in a Northern Town"? Or even good old Dire Straits, and the 1985 domination by their album Brothers in Arms? Hell, I might as well forget my ability to write the bars to Mr Mister's Broken Wings (1986) right now.

So, not only are they a bunch of soul-less coin-counting wankers, but they presume to dictate what data should interest me. I wonder how fast they'd sue me if I went back and rebuilt the data from the early 80s? Let's find out :-)

A name, a name, what's in a name?

2005-08-18T19:52:00.000+10:00

A rose by any other would smell as sweet. But would you still smell it if it was called "Stinking Rag-wort"? (Hah, bet you were thinking I was off on another stupid literary short-cut to a quick blog post. Hah!)

So I'm trying to pick a domain name that meets the following criteria

1) Isn't owned by someone else, somewhere in the world.
2) Is preferably just a .com ... not .com.au
3) Relates vaguely to database guru-ism, as it will eventually peddle my consulting services as a cynical inveterate tinkerer, who masquerades as a DBA.
4) Doesn't make me cringe when I read it. "Someguywhocouldnotfindabetterdomainname.com" doesn't really do it for me.
5) Doesn't have some kind of unfortunate alternative reading, like "dataguy" ... date a guy. I can do without the spam :-)

I've come up with a few lame ones, that godaddy tells me are available, but I'm still not happy. Time will tell if I can think up something that satisfies the above. Comments welcome (and hell, I haven't even thought about comments on this blog before, so there's always a first time).

LHS is off to The Netherlands!

2005-08-18T19:45:00.000+10:00

Little Headed Simon (LHS to his friends) is off to spend 3 days in sunny Venlo.

No, don't laugh. As someone who has spent 3 days in Venlo, I can assure you there's plenty to do. For instance, did you know it takes over 30 minutes to walk from one end of town to the other? How about the beer!? I mean, once you've enjoyed all Venlo has to offer (did I mention the walking already?), you need a good beer to calm yourself down from the rave-in-a-village that is Venlo.

After the beer, and the walking, there's always ... um ... well ... how about more beer!?

Luckily, I know Simon can sink a pint or two. Who knows what a non-drinker would do in Venlo. Lots of walking, I suppose. Simon flies out tomorrow ... Tot Ziens, buddy. Two important phrases you need. "Ich gein sprecht Nederlandse", and "Ahlsterbleift". I'll let you work out what they mean :-)

Ramble On ...

2005-08-09T22:03:00.000+10:00

Jimmy Page and Robert Plant collaborated on one of the greatest tunes in living memory (mmm ... if you're asking yourself "Jimmy who?", then that's Led Zeppelin to you :-).

And funnily enough, the lyrics are strangely prophetic.

"Leaves are falling all around, It's time I was on my way.
Thanks to you, I'm much obliged for such a pleasant stay.
But now it's time for me to go. The autumn moon lights my way.
For now I smell the rain, and with it pain, and it's headed my way. "

So I'm leaving TOWER in Canberra. Well, you say, you've done that before. Gone to Old Blighty none the less. Had a fling, and returned to The Land of Oz (yes, yes, heavy on the literary allusion, this post. Stick with it, you'll learn something).

But this time, it's different (Oh yes, you say, isn't it always :-P). OK, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. After 10 years in the thick of things, it really is time to move on. (Aaaahhhh!!!, you say, you're only moving to TOWER in Sydney ... that's taking the easy way out.) Sydney is definitely the destination, but in all seriousness, this time I'm not moving for a job, or a career, or money.

This time I'm moving for me ... and for Lin. We're moving for us, and not for the sake of someone or something else. Clearly, I've had some kind of ephiphany, and have even suggested to my new boss that I take a pay cut, in return for some time to myself. You know what that means ... more posts like this, and fewer posts taking the piss out of the talentless wankers who keep the seats warm :-)

This is the first time I've mentioned my employer by name in a blog post - it'll probably also be the last. Don't get me wrong - there are "One thousand things and One thing" wrong here (yes, more literary references ... there's a quiz at the end); but more importantly, there are people here I'll miss, and people who've made a lasting impact on me, whether or not I'm happy to admit it.

(Page and Plant continued:)
"The time has come to be gone.
And to our health we drank a thousand times,
it's time to Ramble On."

(hmmm ... sounds like Friday night drinks ... but the count is only about 500 :-) ).

An old friend of mine (ex-co-worker, now many steps down the path to who knows where) once said "Usually I spend no more than three years in a place. Any more, and it changes you. Hard to find yourself after that". (Yeah, thanks Madams ... you could have been a little more forceful with the hint.) Probably shouldn't listen to him too much ... bloody Man United supporter :-)

Page and Plant had more to say ...

"I've been this way ten years to the day, Ramble On,"

Almost spot on ... 10 years in the job is only 3 months away. But then they lose it in some kind of drug-fucked Tolkein homily ...

"Mine's a tale that can't be told, my freedom I hold dear.
How years ago in days of old, when magic filled the air.
T'was in the darkest depths of Mordor, I met a girl so fair.
But Gollum, and the evil one crept up and slipped away with her, her, her....yeah"

Ah crap! So I can't live my life as some shallow metaphor immitating a 70's rock classic, itself immitating a tortured literary classic written by an asocial linguist with an intolerance for his fellow human. Oh well, guess I'll just have to go my own way.

Ramble on.

Into the guts of SQL Server

2005-07-22T09:42:00.000+10:00

I've just spent a week doing the SQL Server internals course developed by the 8 leading SS MVPs who *don't* work for Microsoft. It was a really well constructed course, that included my favourite pass-times like "when MS says don't look at X, grab a hex dump anyway and decipher it like this ...". Having done the hard-core internals work on other databases was a useful baseline that showed me where SQL Server is in comparison with, say, Oracle and DB2. In short, it has a few bits of really cool technology that Microsoft seem hopelessly unable to communicate to the tech community, and a whole bunch of stuff that they think is cool and l33t, but in actual fact is 10-year old stuff that their competition mastered ages ago, and is now the bread and butter of undergrad comp sci degrees that have a "build your own database" course. When someone blindly defends cache-hit ratios as an unquestionably good tuning instrument, you know the kool-aid is mighty strong :-)

I'm going to run a bunch of the tricks I learned over the guts of SQL Server 2005, to see what they've improved or changed. Given I've already developed a point-by-point run down on their new "headline" features, and how badly it appears they're playing catch-up (and failing!), it'll be interesting to see if the engine under the hood has fared any better in the six years it's taken to get to market. I'm willing to be surprised, but somehow think I won't be.

43 Things ... why not 44?

2005-07-06T15:57:00.000+10:00

Gordon suggested I check out 43 things. It's like a window on what a few hundred or thousand other people wish they were doing. Why 43? Don't know, couldn't be bothered digging that far. I thought I'd prefer to be somewhere warm, learning to surf some more. As that wasn't currently on the 43 things list, I thought for a minute about how I get it there ... and then I thought I should just ask someone who already knows.

Which made me think "Hey! Gordon's the guy for that." Kinda circular, I know, but at least I visited a new site :-)

Returning from holiday ...

2005-06-27T14:29:00.000+10:00

feels a little like landing on an alien planet in a B-grade sci-fi movie from the 50s. Everything seems superficially "different", but if you scratch the surface a little, you can see the dodgy styrofoam, wires and duct tape. That's the point you know that things are pretty much as they were when you left ... just a little closer to entropic collapse.

On an entirely different note, I've just run into the 65535 file limit in a zip file from one of my automated jobs. The joy of old code :-( (can you say 16-bit unsigned integer?). I knew I prefered tar for a reason.

If Gaudi had done keyboards

2005-06-10T05:09:00.000+10:00

I'd be typing this on a sublime piece of craftsmanship, with beautiful curves, undulations, impressions of the sea and the sky, and shift keys to nowhere. I'd probably be a bit constrainted that the only characters I could type would be { } and ~ , but I'd live with that.

The man was so obsessed with his work, he forgot to look for the tram that killed him. I wonder what his last thoughts were? "So many harsh straight lines on that tram. What it needs is a curve like a tree in the wind ..."

Heathrow - a love/hate relationship

2005-05-22T01:05:00.000+10:00

So here I am in Heathrow once again. My god I used to hate this place. I think I went through here 20+ times in 2003, and every last bit of dirt, every crap cup of coffee, and every surly service person in the known universe must have congregated here to magnify my loathing. You know a place is really like some deep-in-the-mire corner of squallor when its only redeeming feature is the Pink Elephant parking service ... the bus to freedom, as I used to think of it.

But Heathrow ... all is forgiven. The BA Terrace lounge at terminal 1 (where I type this while watching the FA Cup final, and drinking a fine vintage port that will surely infuriate Stilly) has made up for all the sins of the past. How has it done this? The answer is, after 26 hours of flying cattle-class, tossed around like some kind of human salad, this place includes its own corner of Nirvana. An eight-jet super-massaging shower, with more hot water than the entire Canberra catchment probably has in all its dams :-) And it only gets better, because Man U have just been denied a goal for off-side. The Qantas club membership is money well spent.

Well, back to the life of Riley. Mmm, more vinatage port I think (oh, wait, they've got 15 year old Glenlivet as well. Mmmmmmmmmmm)

End of the TiVo Torture Test

2005-05-18T20:32:00.000+10:00

It's time to end the TiVo Torture Test. Stilly, Simon and Anthony have been teased enough as I've meandered my way to a working TiVo (hacked Oz style, of course). So tonight, I rebuilt it, ran through guided setup, and am now listening to the gentle hum of the guide data building itself.

It's already had its first "success", as Lindsay couldn't believe that CSI:TrailerPark (or whatever version is usually on Wednesdays) had been dropped in favour of PackerVision's latest gutter-journalism - Schapelle Corby: Stupid, or What? (again, probably not its real name, but I claim artistic licence). But no, the great and mighty OzTiVo guide says they've made the switch ... and the TV is obediently moving to the opening credits of said piece of pulp nonsense.

So the TiVo is now in business, just in time to record a billion and one episodes of MythBusters, CSI:*, Law and Order, and Top Gear. My next mission will be to provide the hack for Transact+Foxtel via a single Motorola set-top. But I'm in no hurry :-)

Always enjoy the little things ...

2005-05-17T11:59:00.000+10:00

... because you may look back in years to come and realise they were the big things. Saw this on someone's sig the other day, and remembered I'd had the same motivation many years ago ... just after some loonies flew several planes at several buildings.

We're off on one of our adventure jaunts, which this time includes scuba diving off Greek islands, hiking (well, actually just walking) in the hills of Provence, and battling with the urban combat zone that is the Oxford Circus tube station (seriously, the only place in the world where one wrong step will see you plunge 20 feet, break several limbs, and have your carcass faught over by duelling buskers, winos, beggars, and bible-bashers. Truly scary).

Just when I thought "Hey, not a bad itinerary", word comes in from our friend Srim, aka the uberwebmaster. Srim reports that the other day, she grabbed a mountain bike, looked down from the top of the Andes in Boliva, and plummeted down the "64km Bolivan goat track of death" - a road (and she uses that term loosely) that apparently kills a great many car drviers every year, in part because sections of it are indistiguishable from sheer cliff faces. I can picture the thoughtful signs in Spanish that translate to "Do not be with this sign ... there is no road here, only death".

So the adventure rating is all relative :-)

Marketing - just like the undead, only with better teeth

2005-05-02T13:25:00.000+10:00

Marketing - just like the undead, only with better teeth

I've spent two days thinking about how people find other people's blogs, blogging about blogging etc. I wrote about a cranky customer, with several motivating factors. I knew that I'd exhausted any real avenue of redress for the issue at hand. I knew that it was symptomatic of the perennial effort/reward conundrum that software development typifies. But the message became a victim of a greater problem - trying to "market" the idea of blogs to people who don't care, or worse, fear such disruptive technology.

I was away from the office the day several of our "best and brightest" attempted to convince several of our "other best and brightest" of the merits of blogs, and that opportunities would benifit those who moved fastest. (you'll note everyone around here is "brightest" ... some are just "first among brightest" . .. George Orwell, eat your heart out). The fact that private blogs were happening was used as verbal ammunition in the argument, for reasons most of you can guess.

So that's how the head of the area came to read my blog. And he had kittens. How could I allude to a minor product failure in public? Why didn't I raise the issue with him? What if competitors read what I write? It's sad to see others only slowly realise that you'd asked yourself these questions prior to blogging. We agreed to disagree after I pointed out that I hadn't mentioned names of people, products, etc., that I had made (fruitless) efforts to get the problem fixed which he couldn't remember (trusty audit trail was quite handy here), and that if our competition is reading my blog, they must be in far worse shape than we thought.

So not the best way to market blogging to this person. The self-censorship comes in to play now as this happens more and more - shoot the messenger, don't fix the underlying problems. Arguments were made about blogs not being the place to report bugs ... funny that, it wasn't my intention then, nor will it be in the future. The idea of communicating with other people for purposes greater than simple work seemed to be lost. Oh well, time to get a bullet-proof vest (or a Pope mobile!), because there are sure to be more shots taken at this particular messenger.

Cranky Customer Guy

2005-04-27T15:52:00.000+10:00

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Watching one of your customers suffer in public is painful, but this instance is especially frustrating for me. The very problem this poor chap has was first reported as a bug by yours truly, while working at a snow-bound military base in the wilds of Wiltshire, UK, in February 2003.

Today is April 27 2005, so it's approximately 800 days and counting that this critter has be on the loose. At the time I was told it wouldn't be an issue, as only "secure" environments like the MoD would run in to it. Surprise surprise ... security is now important to everyone!. In the words of poor Cranky Guy ... Bah!

Conference Complete

2005-04-19T23:25:00.000+10:00

Hypothetical: You have 500 hours of free time. What would you do?

a) Indulge in the biggest beer-fueled, pizza-muching, TV-watching extravanganza of all time,
b) Do the 101 odd jobs you'd told yourself you'd always do,
c) Climb some distant mountain so a guru could tell you you'd left your enlightenment at the base-camp, or
d) Volunteer to run a two day linux/open source government for Politicians, Public Servants, and business keen on seeing F/OSS succeed

Well, I ended up doing d! (You'll note I didn't say "choose". Choice played little part ... I must "thank" Stilly for that later)

Open Computing in Government 2005 has been my hobby for the past six months, and it's finally happened. Two days of stuff all to do with getting the Australian Government into the groove of OSS. And with some success.

Our crowd this year was a little smaller than last year, but of the dozens of feedback forms I've read tonight all indicate everyone was impressed by the Speakers (thanks to this fantastic group of people), the troops from AGIMO (thanks John Grant, Colin Thomas, David Mackey, Katie-Jane Lubiewesky, Eric Davis) and even the two Senators who turned up.

I won't rehash everything that happened, but it's good to know people noticed. We got some press here ...

Agencies get open source push

and here ...

Fed guide fosters penguin power

And in all of these places!

Open source 'war of words' intensifies
Feds stomp on Red Hat
Aussie lawyer wants 'clearer' GPL
Favour us over proprietary software: OSS advocates
Microsoft cops standards attack
Government agencies lagging on OSS: Red Hat
Ignore 'fads' when examining OSS: Govt
Govts on path to 'demystify' open source procurement

Stilly even tried to claim press about OCG ( Govt unwraps open source guide) as press about lca ... fat chance Stilly, get your own press :-)

I'm too exhausted to give too many highlights ... perhaps the best was Paul from Novell, who followed the guy from Microsoft (yeah, MS talking open source ... NOT!). The best use of joke BSOD screens I've seen in a while.

The Return of the Death of a Thousand Breakfasts

2005-04-14T10:54:00.000+10:00

I think Stilly will be mad as hell. I've been invited to yet another breakfast. This time from EMC, a kind-of competitor of ours. I say kind-of, as it's the hardware arm that wants to feed me this time, not the newly-acquired software outfit.

Maybe I've made it in to some kind of weird breakfast club, but without the B-grade actors or the 80s fetishism of John Hughes.

Think about it ... could this be some kind of enlightenment ... life as an endless series of vendor breakfasts. The sound of one hand clapping ... no, wait, the sound of trying to get a cup of coffee with one hand, because you've got cold danish in the other.

Nah.

Would you like fries with your network admin?

2005-04-12T10:20:00.000+10:00

Someone commented to Lindsay this week that they prefer her blog posts when she's angry, rather than whimsical or insightful. I thought about it for a moment, and realised that I'm usually only motivated to blog when something is annoying me, or if I'm pissed off. Well, guess what? I'm pissed off! So ... time to blog!

For nearly two weeks, we've had repeated network problems at work. Most of the problems stem from the decision to bring in a new cisco router. While the cow-orkers responsible for the job insist there were "problems" with the kit, I was left wondering what the hell happened to planning, testing, and the like. In fact, any semblance of professional conduct - or competence - seemed to be completely lacking. I could rant for hours on IT infrastructure as basic business plumbing, but I can be more succinct with an analogy. Would anyone, even the most retarted of home handy-person, start tearing out the plumbing, without some thought for what could go wrong. "Well, honey, I disconnected the shower - but what d'ya know, the replacement I bought is actually a dishwasher. Oh well, we'll just have learn to live with it". Even worse, imagine doing this, but not telling the wife until after she walks into the bathroom, to discover she needs to be a Houdini. Communication ... we don't need no stinking communication.

Did these guys take some kind of trans-technological vow of silence. "No talking. And no networking. Oh, and no talking about networking! Yeah ...".

Fuck that. I got to wondering how long a given set of people, whom for all intents and purposes are incapabable of performing a task, can make it appear that they can do it. Essentially, how long can the talentless fake talent? In this case, too fucking long! It doesn't help that the person ultimately responsible for the whole area - a rather "senior" person (in all meanings of the word) - is completely lacking in the two things you'd want from a manager in a techology company ... management skill, and technical savvy.

Well, rant over. I'd think about saying "stay tuned for my next rant", but that would display a naïve confidence in a reliable network :-)

Oz government gets a clue about Open Source

2005-03-31T16:06:00.000+10:00

In my spare time, I'm organising the second annual Open Computing in Government conference, in Canberra (that's Australia, don't you know).

And today, after much behind the scenes negotiating, I got the news that the Australian Government is finally ... after much promising ... going to release the official guide to how government departments should do open source. Everything from assessing its merits against proprietary software, through to comparing TCO, examples of previous open source projects, etc. What's even better, is they've agreed to do the launch at the conference! Cool!

It's called the "Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies". It'll be launched by the Minister responsible for the governments "CIO agency", AGIMO, and followed up by a talk from the team at AGIMO who put it together. More details are available in the press release, but the cool thing is this will finally convince a bunch of software companies, System Integrators, service firms and the like that open source is here to stay, and their biggest customer just got serious about it.

Now, if only I could get my boss to turn up ... we could have a "healing" right there on the conference room floor. :-) (Mmm, I think I'm going to burn for that comment :-) ). If you're already going to linux.conf.au 2005, we'll be right next door!

Death of a Thousand Breakfasts

2005-03-31T14:57:00.000+10:00

What do Kathryn from TIBCO, Jennifer from Sun, and Gail from Microsoft all have in common? They all want to have breakfast with me. More specifically, they've all called in the last couple of days asking if I'd like to go to a breakfast seminar on their technology du jour. And not just one breakfast. Five! In fact, it seems Sun must be attempting to relaunch themselves as a Starbucks-wannabe ... as they host breakfast every Thursday. It all makes sense now ... the obesity epidemic, crop circles, everything. It's all caused by Sun's breakfast brainwashing sessions.

I remember when I first got in to IT I was thrilled the first time I got one of these invites. "Come and eat cold danish and drink coffee of dubious quality while we brainwash you with details of the new SoftwareMeister9000 Total Quality Automated Code Generating Auditing Enterprise Scalable Framework." (Hmm the acronym is STQACGAESF ... I think that was the noise the coffee made when it shot out my nose when I started laughing :-) ).

Now it's just funny, bordering on annoying. I wonder how many homeless people in the city would like breakfast on Thursday? I think I'll give them my "seminar badge", and they can enjoy the corporate largess in my place. Hell, they need it more than I do. And besides, you never know when you'll need a STQACGAESF. :-)

Burn, baby, burn.

2005-03-24T10:55:00.000+11:00

That's the candle, at both ends. Hell, I practically doused the thing in kero, and set to it with a flame thrower.

In the last week I went to Melbourne to present at a conference, spent two days in the mountains having a great time with friends playing cards, drinking, etc., then drove to Sydney to see Bill Bailey, and then home.

So very tired now.

Note to self: Stop volunteering to do things for other people - you don't have time!

Accidental Architectures

2005-03-16T06:13:00.000+11:00

I was having coffee with Gord this morning, discussing things like project overload, Richard Dawkin's theory of Social Darwinism, memes, and that sort of thing, when the concept of Accidental Architecture popped into my head.

A decade ago, my employer used a green-screen bug tracking system it had built itself, first on a ctos box, and then on a old sparc ipc1. We also used our main commercial product for information management at the business level. Roll foward 10 years, and both systems are now running under our current flagship info management product (we dog food our own software ... more on this later), but for no good reason, we still divide the two into separate empires.

And it shits me! Gord and I thought "Hey, our l33t new web product should be used by the dev team ... and they'll need access to their bugs (in one system) and the specs (in another). Wait a minute ... who forgot to merge these suckers?" The answer is, senile damagement*. Even when I was the manager of all internal systems, I couldn't get a straight answer as to why these shouldn't be merged. "Blah blah blah company blah blah blah appropriate blah blah blah noodle blah blah blah helicopter". At least, that's my memory of their side of the arguement :-)

* Senile Damagement: You might prefer the spelling "Senior Management".

Aaaaarrrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhhhhh

All your pictures are belong to us!

2005-03-14T14:23:00.000+11:00

Last night, watching an episode of NCIS, I saw for the second time in a week a pulp-forensics show use the reflection of a suspect taken from a two-buck cctv camera to nab the perp.

Hello!!!! What f(&*ing planet are these people on.

"Oh yes Mr Boss-Man. I'll just enhance the resolution on this eye-ball reflection 20 bazillion times ... " clickety-click-clik "... and voila! We're viewing the suspects's DNA in real time."

The other culprit was one of the CSI clones ... can't remember which one. Probably "CSI:TrailerPark". Hey, what do you mean Bruckheimer hasn't made that one yet? Well, I want the damn royalties ... you heard it here first!