Rubenerd

Patrick Thomas, writing into the Sydney Morning Herald on Monday:

When it comes to the [arts], surely the root cause is market based, and stems directly from Australia’s passionate and over-riding obsession with sport, along with its comparatively peripheral patronage of music and the arts. You can bet, if the status quo was reversed, that politicians, sponsors and developers would be climbing over themselves to fund alternatives to redress the situation [with the Sydney Opera House].

To a certain extent, I agree. Having grown up overseas, it was eye opening for Elke and I to see the pervasiveness of sport in Australian culture. Local TV news here spend the same time talking about sport as Singapore news discusses business.

This got Elke and I thinking that, perhaps, it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. With the obscene amounts of money poured in from advertisers and gaming houses, its in the interests of Australian media companies to hype sport to an extreme, even if most of the population doesn’t care. I’m thoroughly apathetic toward sport, but since moving here I can name several animals that represent clubs; I suppose they can call that a success.

Regardless of whether the Australian media is an accurate representation of the general public’s interests, there’s no doubt sport gets more attention than the arts; cringeworthy reality shows aside.

One thing I would say though, I’d be hesitant to decry one person’s interests as less important. What I do crave is a little more balance in reporting in general; good luck with that though!

So I heard you didn’t get enough foliage photos from my first Wahroonga photo post.

For a guy who spends his life indoors developing on computers, I do crave fresh air and nature sometimes. Good for the mental batteries, as it were :).

For a change of pace and scenery, Clara and I went on a photo expedition to the Wahroonga Park in… wait for it… Wahroonga! Wahroonga is a suburb in northern Sydney, not too far from Hornsby where I currently reside in a residential residence.

Because I’m a walking cliché, my favourite subject matter has always been flowers. For something different though, I decided to focus on leaves and bark this time. The photos are nothing compared to Clara’s, but it was a lot of fun :).

Merlin Mann on the latest episode of that show he does on the 5by5. Go ahead, caller:

I’m somewhere and there’s got to be more out there, that’s so great for books, that’s so great for the internet, and that’s kind of what bums me out about we don’t do stuff in space any more. It seems like there’s so much more we could be doing to be curious, you know? And when we stop being institutionally curious, we die a little.

THIS.

Photo shamelessly stolen from his site. I think Gruber took it.

Peter Payne’s tweet this morning reminded me of this site. I can remember a few years back when all the cool people had Quora accounts; needless to say I was not one of them.

Expertsexchange traded answers found through search engines for money. Quora trades them for privacy and a little sanity. Yes there are workarounds, but the best thing we can do is just let them disappear entirely.

The StackExchange network has their own problems, but at least they’ve rescued us from the necessity of sites such as this.

Sung to the tune of Daft Punk’s Get Lucky. I was in the zone when I thought of this.

She’s up all night ’til the sun
I’m up all night to get some
She’s up all night for good fun
I’m up all night to nom Pocky

We’re up all night ’til the sun
We’re up all night to get some
We’re up all night for good fun
We’re up all night to nom Pocky

We’re up all night to nom Pocky
We’re up all night to nom Pocky
We’re up all night to nom Pocky
We’re up all night to nom Pocky

Cute Pocky girl by Clara’s favourite new artist Piyona on Pixiv.

Like my computer hardware, I tend to use the same bags for a long time. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! That said, I’ve been in the market for a new backpack for a long while now; I thought I found the perfect bag in 2011, but I was never able to track one down to use.

During our last group visit to IKEA however, we remembered the Swedish meatball restaurant with an attached furniture section had begun selling luggage! They’re probably no Swiss Army bag in design or durability, but upon inspecting the Upptäcka backpacks we were pleasantly surprised. For less than a meal for two in Sydney (it’s more expensive than New York), we can get something that ticks all my boxes for a backpack:

• Dual external pouches for water bottle and coffee Thermos™
• Non-detachable pouch for at least a 11″ MacBook Air or ThinkPad X
• Front pouch for notebook, or more likely an iPad Mini!
• Tough fabric construction
• Cold fusion reactor or solar panels to recharge things
• Padded shoulder straps
• Plain front to pin large numbers of anime badges

Well, most of these. The lack of a fusion reactor is a shame, but for $24 I can’t complain.

Next time we’re all at IKEA, I will be purchasing a pink one of these and letting you know my experience.

Below are my two cents from a recent UTS survey. Without seeing the rest of the “rank these things from 1 to 5″ questions, I think you can grok what it was about.

Judging from the questions asked in the survey, it appears as though UTS is interested in using more technology to help students. This would be achieved through more services offered through UTS, as well as more interactive, online technology to supplement (or replace) traditional lectures and tutorials.

To the first point, it’s my belief that you can give students the most technically advanced, easy to use university collaboration systems, but they won’t use them (or will use them reluctantly if forced). Millennials engage in social networks with established friend lists, and they’ll always revert to the tools they’re used to. To that end, the best way the university can support learning is to deploy a small, fast, streamlined system that allows students to access the materials they need for a course with as little trouble as possible. Needless to say, Blackboard doesn’t fit this role.

To the second point, it’s an intriguing idea that tech can be used to supplement lectures. Dr. Bernard Wong recorded his lectures for us during Business Requirements Modelling at UTS, which I used to study from during commutes. That said, as I answered in a previous question the key is to still provide engaging human contact. Some people just attend university for a qualification, others of us also go to engage with industry professionals and to learn from their real world experience. Technology (in an of itself) can’t replace this.

Compared to the other (albeit limited) places I’ve been, I’ve been quite surprised and pleased by the willingness of UTS staff to accept feedback.

Clara has since written a thoughtful follow up post. To address her first concern though, it wasn’t in an email, it was advertised as a banner on UTS Online :)

Happy Friday night folks! In 2011, I delightfully reported VMware fixed their Windows NT 4.0 Additions. Unfortunately, they still didn’t come with sound drivers, and a solution eluded me.

I’m not sure if this was a change in the interim, but I’ve since learned VMware Fusion emulates Sound Blaster PCI128 cards in their older VMs. From the “What is Sound Blaster PCI128″ help file:

Legacy game compatibility was originally a problem when considering a PCI-based audio card since existing software and games for the personal computer had been designed to run on ISA-based audio cards. To function properly, those cards must write directly to the inherently slow ISA Direct Memory Access (DMA) controller. These signals are not present in the PCI bus. Sound Blaster PCI128, thus, allows legacy software to function as if the ISA signals are present, while using the faster speed of the PCI bus.

In practical terms, this means VMware can offer sound support to older OSs that require legacy ISA support. Compared to VirtualBox which I’ve also blogged about, this also means VMware guests also have full MIDI support. Yes, you heard me.

To enable this card in a Windows NT 4.0 guest, make sure you’ve installed Service Pack 6a and the latest VMware Additions. Then simply head to Creative’s product page for the card, choose “Windows NT 4.0″ from the second dropdown box, and download the latest driver from the page. Once installed, you’ll have full sound support.

If you were born in the late 1980s like me, may I suggest playing CANYON.MID in Media Player (or a classic version of WinAmp) to drown out those buzzkills asking why you want sound in a Windows NT VM. And have fun!

After my interest was piqued and an HD earned from Dr. Farookh Hussain’s Cloud Computing and Software as a Service last semester, I enrolled in Dr. Min Xu’s Cloud Computing Infrastructure subject at UTS this semester.

During this semester break, today Clara and I we were very fortunate to have a personal tour of Equinix’s 18,400 square metre SY3 data centre in Green Square, Sydney. We assembled outside the impressively large and spotless building, then were issued our rather snazzy yellow guest lanyards and ushered inside Willy Wonka’s data factory.

(Understandably, photography wasn’t permitted. Their site has some pretty impressive photos and videos of the facility. For the purposes of this post, we’ll have to make do with my post-data-centre-visit coffee and free information folder :)

Terry Takouridis, Director of Digital Content and Media, gave us an introduction to the company and its history. Founded in Silicon Valley in 1998, the idea was allowing network providers and businesses to connect and securely deliver their content. Their data centres have expanded to dozens of cities around the world including Sydney and my home back in Singapore. Well, not my home specifically, they’d barely fit two racks in there.

We were also fortunate to meet Global Solutions Architect Steve Dumbrell again, who gave a lecture on “Virtualising the Data Centre” earlier in the semester at UTS. Both Steve and Terry gave us a walk through the centre, pointing out and explaining interesting infrastructure and site operations.

The tour of the centre was nothing short of breathtaking. I’ve been in server room for two medium sized multinationals (one would more accurately call them server closets!), but this was an entirely different level. Passing by futuristic blue LEDs, ceiling mounted fibre optic cable racks, large white air conditioning cabinets and row after row of server cages, at times I felt as though I was walking through a Star Trek corridor!

One of the most impressive part of the system for me was the cooling system. Each floor in the meticulously clean centre uncovered new systems designed to keep the more than 3000 racks operating within 21 degrees and narrow humidity bands. Raised floors and grates allowed chilled air to be delivered into cool corridors, which would be passed through the servers and exited through the ceiling on the other side. To save power in the event of a failure, gargantuan tanks of water are kept chilled to maintain the required temperatures, thereby negating the need to run expensive air conditioners.

Among the rows and rows of computers, cooling systems and redundant power, Steve and Terry also explained the human side of the site’s operations. Five levels of security, including biometrics and card access get you in the door, and further access are required for the server farms and other sensitive rooms. A break room with pinball machines (yes!) allow tired network engineers and sysadmins a much needed reprieve, especially after extended shifts that may have started the moment their plane arrived in Sydney.

I’d go into far more detail, but for confidentiality and out of respect for our tour gides, I’d best leave it at that!

We’re incredibly lucky to be in Sydney to witness such a centre; Australia’s relative lack of infrastructure investment mean these areas of Sydney are the only viable places in Australia to host such facilities. Still, Equinix’s centres around Green Square attract some pretty high profile names you would have heard of, including Amazon. Their hosted systems also provide valuable caching all of us benefit from.

My thanks goes out to Steve Dumbrell and Terry Takouridis for showing us around and answering all our questions, it was a real blast and a nice reminder for why I’m so passionate about IT. Thanks also to Dr. Min Xu at UTS for organising the event.