What does a five day gap on an obsessively updated blog look like? According to Google Reader, it looks like the affixed graph.
Kinda sad that such a large part of my life can be expressed in a simple two-dimensional bar graph. Then again, it's better than the other way of visually expressing a week without blogging:
While my site was in limbo over what I've uncreatively dubbed the bandwidth overshooting of May 2009, I got an email from the university about swine flu. Well this afternoon I recieved another message. They really do seem to be taking this seriously.
Dear students,
As you may be aware, the number of cases of H1N1 in Australia is continuing to rise – as at 5:00am on Monday 1 June, Australia has 302 confirmed cases, with 6 confirmed cases in South Australia. The University is closely monitoring any possible impact of the spread of the virus on UniSA staff and students. The University has protocols in place to support staff and students and to minimise both the risk and disruption to campuses and the University as a whole. There are currently no confirmed cases among UniSA staff or students. Should UniSA have a confirmed case of H1N1, students at risk will be contacted and advised accordingly.
It is important to remember that simple hygiene helps protect against any infection. The World Health Organisation provides excellent advice on precautions to avoid the spread of viruses (http://www.who.int/csr/disease/swineflu/frequently_asked_questions/what/en/index.html). Students who develop any flu-like symptoms are urged to stay away from University campuses and seek medical attention. If you need particular advice, please call the National Swine Influenza hotline on 180 2007.
Regards,
Professor Peter Lee
Deputy Vice Chancellor: Academic
This was a spontaneous extreme test of my new budget AF-S NIKKOR 55-200mm VR. Without warning, a helicopter flew above us in the distance, and I had just enough time to pull the camera out of the camera bag (yes, a camera in a camera bag!) and take this picture before it flew into the distance. It was a blend of low light with a very fast moving object a long distance away with a uniform background. You can't plan for such moments!
Considering it was very low light, the body of the helicopter came out sharper and more well definied that I would have expected, thanks in part because it's VR. Even with my glasses I couldn't see any writing from the ground, but here we can clearly make out "FTA" and the "VH-FIX" registration (doesn't sound like a reassuring one!). If I were the type to snoop, this would be an affordable lens to use, no question. Wait, what?
What you can see though with the uniform background is the falloff (dark corners); while I'd like to pretend I intentionally made the centre of the image brighter and the corners darker, this is the result of using the lens at the extreme 200mm end. One thing I've learned with using DX lenses is the same with choosing an ISO level in the camera: generally it's better to be more conservative with your choice of settings and to avoid using it's most extreme setting.
The great thing about this lens is it's perfect for my D60, being a DX and AF-S lens it autofocuses (albeit not as quickly as my kit 18-55mm). I've been really spoilt by the stunningly surpreme sharpness of my AF NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8D (which is actually designed for full frame cameras), but it is nice to have the camera autofocus sometimes, especially in a situation like this photo when the reflexes of the photographer are especially important!
I'll continue to leave my 50mm mounted on my cute Nikon D60 because it's sharpness, speed and brilliant performance in low light is absolutely unmatched between my three lenses, but this 55-200mm is lightweight and very capable if used properly, and am looking forward to doing some more testing when I don't have so much work to do. Ken Rockwell really likes this lens.
I clearly still have much to learn about this interesting hobby!
Sent an email yesterday to GRC's sales department asking if they had a licence for student use:
Hello there!
I’m a computer science student in Australia interested in buying a licence for SpinRite for preventitive maintainence on several drives I use for my 100GB+ assignments. I have backups, but I work these drives pretty hard and am worried about looking after them properly.
Unfortunately AU$115.00 for a full licence for me is prohibitively expensive, so I was wondering if you offer student pricing? I understand such a licence would limit me to use only on my own machine I’m actively using for studiying, and I would be obligated to purchase a regular full licence when I finish my degree and am no longer a student.
Cheers, Ruben
Just got a reply last night Adelaide time, or yesterday morning California time:
Hi Ruben,
We’re sorry but we do not offer any type of educational discounts on SpinRite.
Thanks for your interest.
Sincerely,
Sue
GRC
Sales Dept.
After my initial dissapointment ebbed I was left with a sense of confusion. I would think if I were the creator of a product like SpinRite that's mostly sold through word of mouth sales, I would especially want computer science students actively using it and showing it to friends and classmates in a university environment.
Fresh computer science graduates would be a huge market for specialised software like this. Imagine if they reduced the price by 20% for students, but as a result a dozen people saw me use it and subsequently got their own student licences. I've seen this activity happen numerous times, friends of mine have combined bought hundreds of dollars worth of Mac software after seeing me demo it, and vica versa. Given we're in the formtive stages of our careers, software we start using and liking now could very well become indispesable parts of the toolkits we carry with us for many long years.
GRC absolutely has the right to deny me this request, on no part of their site do they make any suggestion of student pricing. I guess I'm just frustrated that I don't understand their business logic. To be fair, I am doing computer science and economics not business, so perhaps I'm not supposed to.
If you ever read this Steve, I'm a huge fan, but I encourage you to think about this.
Well it's official ladies and gents, now that it's the 1st of June this site's bandwidth quota has been reset and is now back in business! I've gone ahead and signed up for a higher plan with my webhost that provides four times the bandwidth which is more than I need now, but allows for future growth.
I could probably have left it at that, but I've also been taking a closer look at my server logs to determine where all my bandwidth has been going. I've had websites for over ten years but this is the first time I've had a problem with traffic (says a lot really!) and I found it hard to believe a simple blog like this could chew through over 28 GiB in a month!
To my surprise, over 15GiB of bandwidth (yes, really!) was used in the month ending May this year on larger versons of the image shown above, and the one below, both of which I just put here in passing in posts back in 2007 (Kmahjongg and gingerbread at 0206am, Thinning universal binaries with ditto) because of my aversion to dry posts without images:
Clearly the problem is hotlinking! As if this act isn't inconsiderate enough, many people used the image for backgrounds on their social networking pages which got refreshed hundreds of times of day, others put them on gallery pages and didn't even bother creating a thumbnail for people to click on first. I've blocked these sites, and already I'm seeing vastly reduced data usage. I blame myself for not picking this up sooner.
On a traditional website a simple, blanket solution would be merely inserting code similar to this in your .htaccess file to return an access denied error if the referring address wasn't your own. An alternative would be to simply replace the hotlinked image with a smaller one, usually with a stern warning attached.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+.)?mysite.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ - [F]
Right off the bat, if you're someone who knows about RSS feeds and the like, you can see a problem with this. Unfortunately if you implement this fix, people who read your blog posts using an external blog aggregator such as Google Reader or Bloglines will be denied access to images in your posts! I'd rather not instigate a whitelist because I don't know what software people are using to read my posts and I don't want to give preferential treatment to some over others. It goes against the free nature of the internet, and I inhereted my late mum's hippy freedom beliefs ^_^.
I've also decided not to only include summaries in my RSS feeds instead of the entire post to save bandwidth. I can't stand it when others do it, and I won't do it. That said, I'm giving some thought to filtering out anime and study related posts from the main RSS feed once I've imported those sites into this blog, and allowing others to subscribe to them if they want using category feeds.
As I said at the top, I've never had a popular site before with material on it people want! It's been a learning experience.
Microsoft's new Chandler Bing search engine thinks I'm in the United Kingdom. I'm flattered that they've correctly recognised the history of my mum's side of the family, but it sure ain't true now! is it because I'm using the GB English version of Firefox? Or that I have the British English Dictionary plugin?
This observation aside I yawned, closed the tab and opened Wolfram Alpha. Now there's a company doing something interesting, fresh and different with data and search!
I know this dead horse has been beaten to… death, but Microsoft needs to stop doing all this haphazardly branded online stuff, divest themselves of their existing assets, and work on Office and Windows. The only people I've seen with MSN or Windows Live search boxes on their pages are people on Microsoft's payroll, or those with their material hosted on their servers, and I have very serious doubts Mr Chandler will be any different.
I guess they could do some astroturfing.
My sister and I are studying in Mawson Lakes, a new residential neighbourhood built next-door to the University of South Australia technology and engineering campus, and the South Australia Technology Park. There's separate piping for recycled grey water. There's a small outdoor shopping centre with a supermarket, newsagent and cafes alongside the lake, and just next door to our semi-detached house is the Mawson Interchange which the Gawler train service and half a dozen bus routes stop. We don't have a car, and don't need one.
Decades before any of this stuff was built though a shunting yard for the ill-fated federal Australian National railway system was set up and still largely exists with it's original signage, curiously right smack in the middle of this brand new suburb! All that seperates it is an opaque green fence.
I had just come back from shopping and an hour or so to spare on Saturday afternoon, so I threw my tiny Nikon D60 DSLR and AF NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8 combo into my camera bag and went exploring. As I've said before because the D60 is a budget DSLR it won't autofocus with this lens, but I find manually focusing more rewarding and fun anyway.
Despite many of the rails looking abandoned, two broad gauge lines are still used for the Gawler train service from Adelaide, and a standard gauge line that runs all the way to Perth, 2700 kilometres (1,678 miles) away.
What I really found beautiful was everywhere I looked nature taking back what was hers. I imagine if all us humans suddenly vanished the entire planet would start looking like this in short order. It'd only be a matter of time.
You can see the rest of the photos over on my Flickr gallery page surprisingly titled Mawson Lakes shunting yard.
I tend to listen to Whole Wheat Radio during the early afternoon, and my own music later in the evening. Since using Libre.fm to scrobble music I've noticed many artists I listen to haven't been in their database before and are subsequently automagically added. What a mouthful.
The latest such artist is Michael Franks! Currently if you click any of these covers, I'm the only one who's played him, even Popsicle Toes and Tiger in the Rain. Unfortunately I don't have all his music in CD form, I inherited from my mum all his classics on original LPs but as far as I know I don't think any scrobbling client currently supports such archaic devices :).
The great thing about being an early adopter of a service is you get to be part of the site during important milestones like this. Well, at least I consider them important. As Michael sang in one of his songs: "Just continue reading me…" which doesn't make sense given he's a singer/songwriter not an author. I guess I could read along with the lyrics. Why do I talk to myself so often here now? Can senelity set in when you're 23? Don't answer that.
I wrote my Michael Franks music review back in January 2007.
I did the Australian Political Party quiz and got… the Australian Greens. I never would have guessed!
I do protest the last line in the description of the party though; yes short term profits will be affected, but to be blunt if we don't take action now, business won't matter. We also have to stop valuing a society just on how much money it makes. Money is critically important, but how useful or valuable is it if generating it results in irreversible damage? I'm a huge fan of sustainable economics not just because in the long term it's the only model that will actually work (refer to the current financial crisis to see this) but because it takes into account social issues and the environment.
I'm not [entirely] a socialist because I think capitalism is still more efficient than governments in determining what gets produced and at what price because purely socialist systems don't have the market price mechanism to gauge demand in real time. That said, completely unfettered capitalism is efficient only for those in positions of economic and business power, and without [effective!] government oversight and checks, businesses will only serve their own interests and will price goods out of the range of some who need it (think healthcare, food, education). And that none of this matters if we wreck the planet.
Perhaps I should just stick to talking about green economics! Standing down from my soapbox now.
Given my current bandwidth crunch here, until the 1st of June when my monthy allocation is reset I won't be creating any new blog posts. It's going to be tough and one of the longest gaps I've had here, but I'll get through it!
In the meantime I'm still available on Twitter for a chat, and you can check on my progress over at Libre.fm.
See you on the other side,
Ruben