Sydney’s covered in a dust storm this morning and everyone’s talking about it. It’s pretty funky coloured and unprecedented in recorded history. Tori says Thank God in her new blog (at least, that’s the blog’s focus :)) — others say more amusing things. Here’s a sample.

““UFO?” — my brother, “no, dust storm” — me. He looked upset.”

“[name] proudly welcomes you to Sydney Ranga Day. You can’t see us, but you know we’re out there.”

“[name] would hate to be holding a climate change deniers press conference in Sydney today.”

“Apparently you shouldnt go outside if u have asthma” [sic] — stating the obvious award

“[name] wonders if, due to global warming, jesus will return on a cloud of orange dust?”

“[name] is wondering how he got inside a sepia photo?!”

“[name] wants it to rain so she can make a mud pie on her car”

“Hey guys i had this big bag of red dust that i left outside, but how [sic] can’t find it. Would anyone know where it is?”

In Sydney, there is security in so many things. I trust in family, in friends, in personal and professional networks, in job security and my own abilities. I trust in credit cards, Internet providers, newspapers and mobile phones. All of these things come to nothing, dissolving in the face of studying a language so radically different from my own first language. Yet, were I to achieve any degree of comfortableness in this language, at least some of the things in which I falsely find security would, without sound reason, assume that position of trust in my life once more.

The one true thing to trust in is common to all languages, all people, and every place on earth. There’s just one sure and certain hope that is unfailing. When every thing and person on earth gives way, Jesus alone is our hope and stay. (So thankful to God for Tori’s reminder of that in the midst of my freaking out about all of this tonight — you are a wise and godly woman Tori!)

Business strategy, internet development, and the exciting insanity of startup work in an amazing industry with the best colleagues will transform into, near-exclusively, the well-trodden path of laborious language study, learning through humbling failure and the necessity of constant correction by even the closest of friends. Yet language learning opens doors, communicates truths, and, similarly to the insanity of startups, is spurred along by necessity and an urgent need for improvement.

For my part, I’m learning to trust God more and having the false objects of my hope called out in front of me by even the suggestion of having to leave them behind. It’s funny, because I thought I’d thought about this — I guess as things become concrete problems get harder to ignore! Strangely, the things I had thought will be difficult to let go and live without — a car, a great IT setup, books, purchasing power due to constrained exchange budget, etc. — hadn’t even come up in my mind yet (though they may later).

Perhaps the issue for me is less materialism, as I had thought, and more pride and an overdependence on the things that don’t satisfy and give life to the full! The absurdity of this situation is perhaps best encapsulated in the observation that I am torn at the spectacular breadth, depth and width of opportunities provided. It is ridiculous to think that I, such a mediocre student, should be given the chance to study at a top-5 university as well as the remarkably well-regarded University of Sydney. The ridiculousness of this is, perhaps, only surpassed by the fact that I then proceed to complain about it!

And both these privileges are like rubbish compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing the Lord Jesus Christ — this is the most absurd opportunity of all. To be loved by the Creator, whose creation (of which I am part) destroyed Him, though death could not hold Him down, such that death promises eternal life through Christ’s victory: it is beyond comprehension! 感谢主！

Friday was a pretty insane day, but I snapped this photo (cameraphone, dunno what happened top right!) arriving at our office in the morning before getting into it. We’ve got a pretty incredible view over Coogee, which is fantastic… except for when the sea and sky are such amazing colours and you know there’s not a chance of actually getting outside to it!

There were some sheets of light rain and these incredible clouds that cleared off to perfect skies and an ocean that even I, someone who doesn’t particularly rate swimming and has never learnt to surf despite living within 5km of the coast his whole life, wished I was free to head over to.

It is good to give thanks to the Lord,
to sing praises to your name, O Most High;
to declare your steadfast love in the morning,
and your faithfulness by night,
to the music of the lute and the harp,
to the melody of the lyre.
For you, O Lord, have made me glad by your work;
at the works of your hands I sing for joy.

– Psalm 92

We were made to work even before sin entered the world, but I reckon work/time-outside-on-a-beautiful-day balance would’ve been better then! For those trust Jesus, a future is coming where every day all are freed to give thanks to Him forever…  even those stuck in beige office towers!

If someone feels called or led or like God spoke to them… no-one knows what to do.

– Mark Driscoll

I actually laughed aloud hearing him say this. It’s really sad but so completely upside down I find it kind of hilarious. Mad world.

Some things that your average travel agent and TRAVCOUR visa processing probably either don’t know, or won’t tell you. Unless you’re booking through a China specialist, but hey, more info out there can’t hurt. The few travel agents I’ve spoken to this time around were happy to admit they didn’t understand what was happening, so nothing too bad to report on that front!

1. Only tick the bare minimum. If you’re going for sightseeing, just tick that box. If you tick the relatives box you’ll have to prove they exist. You need to prove everything exists. The whole process is an existential nightmare!
2. A certain security guard at certain consulate (hint: I haven’t been outside of Sydney since February and have been told in the last month to do this, which certainly narrows it down a bit!) will not let you in without perfect documentation. He’s not Chinese (they use a private security firm at least for public areas), and not very understanding. If you’ve filled in a form before you get there, pretend you haven’t. If you need to go inside and try to talk to someone this is probably the best strategy. Call me naive, but this is preferable to faking documents using a travel agent, which was the course of action he recommended. I kid not. Let it be noted: The other security guard at the embassy is fantastic and nice and helpful… but only speaks English. Must be hellish for Hua Ren (with not-great-English) trying to get in!
3. Don’t actually fake your papers if you can avoid it. I was (again, probably naively) shocked at being essentially instructed to lie as a matter of process, and obviously this isn’t a course of action that actually should be recommended by anyone. The process is difficult enough without added complication brought about by fraud!
4. If your travel plans are uncertain, don’t worry about documenting other cities too much.
5. If you need double-entry, for example because you’re traveling to Hong Kong and back into China, be aware that you will need to document a destination back inside China. Again, the specifics of this don’t matter too much — but you are meant to produce tickets for travel along with your visa application. Specifically speaking of Hong Kong, you can circumvent this requirement by writing in the itinerary field “Destination (by train)” or similar method of transport that is very unlikely to be documented months in advance. You will need proof of accommodation at your first destination, but beyond this it doesn’t seem to much matter.
6. If you’re staying with family/friends that may complicate matters. You may or may not need booked accommodation for the duration of your stay… I didn’t test this one out!
7. Hong Kong SAR isn’t a problem at all re: accommodation or anything else if you’re an Aussie. So don’t bother with this for your visa application… it’s part of China, sure, but not for the purposes of complicated bureaucracy!
8. The actual Chinese staff at the embassy are really nice and really helpful, once you get past the trollish security guard and figure out at least roughly what paperwork you need! If in doubt, figure out a way to get inside and stand in the visa queue and ask them, and they’ll probably be able to help you with whatever question. That’s how I discovered the (by train) itinerary flexibility!

Finally, this is just my experience in one place in Australia, and will probably change. Even in 悉尼 :P

With Tim & Selo. We left at about 10.30pm after Ellen’s and got back by 5.30pm the next day. APEC traffic had nothing on us ;-)

This one sits in a cupboard, answers to the name of ‘whisper’, reaches obscene temperatures in summer (yet does not crash), and, at its heart, features a low-power-consumption processor and motherboard by VIA. It also has two hard drives and a single 512MB (8-chip double-sided (16 total)) DDR-400 DIMM.

And that is all.

Most of the time, it’s relatively untaxed… it acts as file storage, a web server for miscellaneous stuff I want to share quickly, and a development box for more adventurous things. At one stage it was hosting streaming media (and, very very briefly, a Counter-Strike server… it is horribly under-specc’d for such duties). It’s also useful for SSH’ing into and bypassing proxies when you really need to get to something (entirely legitimate, mind), but increasingly less so as a certain workplace of mine blocked SSH out access when we moved floors. No matter — I’ve identified a HTTPS-SSH solution to that particular problem, but haven’t been motivated to implement it just yet!

So, here’s the run-down:

			Load	Idle
VIA EPIA PD10000	23W	15W
Generic 512MB		2W	1.5W
ST380011A		12W	8W
ST380011A		12W	8W
			49W	32.5W

Most of those have been rounded a little bit, but… let’s just say it only uses 49W at the most.

Then, there’s the 65%-efficiency-at-full-load (230W) power supply to consider. We’re no-where near full load, but let’s just say it’s consistently efficient (or, in-efficient) regardless of load. In practice, it’d probably be slightly better for lower loads due to reduced heat production.

So, our 49W suddenly becomes (49x1.35) 66.15W

That’s 579.47kWh/year, which (apparently) equates to about 400KG of emissions. This, friends, is absolute worst-case scenario. More realistically, the system will be idle most of the time, using 384.3kWh/year, and pumping out around 260KG of carbon.

I’d be interested to see how this would compare to a typical laptop computer.

For this particular computer, there’s only a little that can be done to improve efficiency. The obvious target is the two hard drives, which, combined, draw nearly as much power as the rest of the system! Considering there’s not a dramatic amount of storage presently in use, I could almost justify replacing these with a solid-state device (in the form of an IDE-card reader bridge, because real SSD drives remain prohibitively expensive and difficult to obtain in this country) if the need were really there.

And what would create such a need? Well, part of the reason I wanted to find out was to see how many hours this thing could live off a fairly cheap UPS for. Turns out it’s probably got at least an hour’s worth of life in it, which is moderately incredible compared to the typical ten-minute-or-it’s-fsck-time expected parachute expectancy!

The only problem in adding a UPS is that they’re not the world’s most energy efficient devices themselves, with an APC 500VA model chewing 24BTU (82.02W, since we’ve been working in that thus far) per hour when “online”. BTU is a measure of thermal energy dissipation, by the way, so probably it’s also less-than-ideal for sticking in a cupboard in which the next-largest heat source is probably the power supply at a meagre 17.15W (assuming its inefficiency is purely thermal, which, of course, it won’t be — other non-thermal radiation must account for at least some of its loss).

So, there we go. A fairly useless exercise that will become marginally less useless if ever there are rolling brownouts in Sydney and I need something to be able to weather the power storm. The other great thing about UPS is they provide fairly decent power conditioning, too. Given you can pay about $50 for a decent 6-way surge protected board, or only $140 for a 500VA (300W) APC UPS these days, it’s really not that bad a deal afterall.

Sources:

VIA EPIA-PD10000 power usage: http://www.via.com.tw/download/mainboards/3/4/OG_EPIA-PD_111804.pdf
Generic 512MB DDR-400 memory power usage:
My memory, from prior reading and specs of higher-quality memory that actually publish such data.
Seagate ST380011A power usage:
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/manuals/ata/cuda7200pm.pdf

SFX-230M2 switching power supply (used by a lot of big OEMs like Dell and HP, it turns out) specifications:
http://www.sirtec.com.tw/photot2/10205/210205R11.pdf

Either way… highly recommended editions.

Also to acquire when next book shopping: Alice in Wonderland, for some opium-fuelled holiday reading. And perhaps Hitchhiker’s Guide to see if I can endure it nine years from when I last tried… less likely fuelled by opium, but from all reports it sounds bizarre enough to warrant suspicion of the involvement of some other mind-altering substances!

Holiday reading = after June 22nd, whereupon my last exam occurs. Then, off to lead on a study camp (perhaps time for reading? I can justify Alice as being in support of the HSC English ‘journeys’ core!) for a week, three days back home in Sydney (undoubtedly to be insanely busy) before going away to New Zealand from the 4th to 16th of July. My how time flies. I may or may not be at university in an equal capacity next semester due to a whole bunch of things, primarily related to its perceived importance and myriad other opportunities that are cropping up all over the place. It would be, for example, nice to have some money in exchange for funny hours in the form of more work (which I think I prefer to regular and boring hours) and not have to pursue useless assessments (I speak of one particular subject that has copped flak on this blog over the past few months) around this.

The CYIADA thing is progressing nicely. Michael came on board about a month ago as chief code monkey, which has been nice coz I’ve been spending a bit more guilt-free time in Photoshop. There is a two-fold reason for that, first of which being I don’t feel like I need to try and prototype anything on my own, and the other is that now he’s developing stuff, there’s an imminent need for front-end to make this thing saleable! We’re close to landing on a new name that doesn’t sound like something you’d use to gas people with.

There’s a meeting tomorrow arvo wherein we will speak of many things (except perhaps for shoes and ships and ceiling wax and cabbages and kings), involving a progress update, an extensive argument about names and inclusiveness, prayer, another argument about launch dates and where/how it’s going to be hosted, who’s providing SMS, how much money we’re planning on losing and for how long, how we’re going to promote it, open sourcing things we write, and lots lots more.

I should really update the CYIADA project blog, too, but we haven’t got staggeringly good readership over there anyway (well, not compared to here, though perhaps more after Southern Cross’ coverage — at the end of that article, which is effectively buried online, though less so in print… ironically we need online readers far more than print ones!) so hopefully that will wait until we settle on a new name (and associated domain name acquisitions take place).

Oh and in unrelated news, my camera turned up. It wasn’t in Selo’s car. This is a good and a bad thing… good because I have no money to spend on a still camera right now, bad because I have no reason to buy a new one even if I did :P It’s still got another six months of life left in it I think, though it’s looking pretty abused. Still takes decent pictures. I’m so happy with its performance over the last two and a half years (link goes to first photos I took with it), seriously. I will struggle to make up my mind when it dies about what kind of camera to get… a larger SLR would be more useful for production stuff and night time things, but this is so portable… I don’t know.

And there is a decent sized blog update.

Now, I should stop procrastinating and prepare to kick off some fairly pressing freelance work when I get back from uni tonight! Uni assessments, also, are proving to be rather worthy of procrastination. Ahhhh… I keep remembering “one more thing” to write about: 28 Weeks Later proved to be a seriously scary zombie flick. Saw it with Ben and Tori last night. Was ultimate year 10 flashbacks, only with added alcohol and late nights without concerned parentals! We went to Pizza Hut all you can eat afterwards… its so disgusting but such good fun :P

As for the movie… it’s quite messy. But it was spectacularly produced… I need to re-watch the first one, but I’m pretty sure it was much more in-your-face suspenseful. It sets up for a third film at the end, which vaguely irritates me, but… well, rumours have it that it’ll be capped at a trilogy only. And this was a really good sequel, so I don’t think it’ll matter too much. Wikipedia has full spoiler detail for 28 Weeks Later… See the film first instead if you can normally handle that sort of thing.

Anyway — OpenID is still around 10 months later (though the spec was last updated around the time I last wrote on the matter), WordPress.com have announced they are now an IdP for it, and it seems everyone wants to be a provider, not a consumer (in OID spec parlance, consumer means the website requesting verification of an Identity — “end user” is the term given to an actual human user).

In fact, Ma.gnolia.com is the only OpenID consuming site of consequence that I’ve encountered thus far in my travels. Which is, to say the least, slightly perplexing.

I’m aware the whole point of OpenID is that it’s a vastly decentralised spec that enables myriad providers to exist, but it seems somewhat redundant (in the sense in which that means “pointless, without purpose”, not failover-type redundancy) if there does not exist a single consumer of consequence!

And, let’s face it, why should being a consumer be attractive? You know less about your customers, they can bail on you more quickly, and… all of a sudden, advertising is the only way of monetising a website. JanRain operate “MyOpenID: Your first (and last) identity provider”, as well as a couple of services that use OpenID, and have (to my eyes, at least) no conceivable way of generating revenue at present.

Which is potentially fine, but completely stupid if that’s happening on a wider scale. As a concept, OpenID has much to offer — I just wouldn’t use it in CYIADA. I might consider it for smaller projects (commercial clients), but, really, I think it’d have a better chance if Myspace were an OpenID provider. And we all know what they’re like when it comes to web standards (and general usability issues)!

Plus, of course, there’s the issue of the popularity of up-stream providers if you want to verify against something other than OpenID (like, for example, someone’s Google account — which you can do quite easily using various API tools they provide). With anything youth targeted, there’s a special impetus that we don’t really see in other places. I read this absolutely hilarious comment on a great analysis of an article about Myspace:

It’s easy to imagine teenagers as a pack of wildebeests on a grassy plain, simply running with wild abandon.

Why yes, yes it is. They’re not (article has more on this), but the bottom line is if you’re using external verification services, you’re dependent on the existence and longevity of these services for the existence and longevity of your services, not the least in user profiling and building up meaningful market data so you can adjust your mix to a known audience.

OpenID feels like a wonderful technology in a chicken-egg situation. It’s still just too bloody geeky for your average LJ user to get on board with. And they’ve got it easy. For anyone else, it’s completely impossible.

Here in Sydney, we could probably get away setting up verification against Windows Live simply because that’s what people use here, as I have noted before (about halfway down the post linked). But developing different authorisation schemes as a matter of localisation is most definitely not in my book of best practices (if I were ever to write one :P) — so, instead, fragmented Internet identities persist.

That bugs me.

If you have any answers or thoughts… let me know. Blog about it and send a pingback/trackback. That’s one of the few open standards that’s worked well on the web, albeit with plenty of spam abuse, but there’s of course the problem that not enough people are socially blogging aside from software developers and design geeks and… whatever category I fit into (“web strategist” is still what I’m calling myself… we’ll see how much longer that sticks) — so, of course, there’s no instinct to reply in this manner.

In the same way, developer and business instinct is to build your own authentication and profiling platform. Is it worth resisting?

Job ads are marginally expensive… we’d better get some applicants from those two!

Please be praying we find someone good (or, suitably sinful but repentant and appropriately talented, because there’s nearly no such thing as a good person).

Ad proper after the break:

A Christian youth organisation (Anglican Youthworks) is looking for a programmer to commence immediately as part of a small team.
This is a project-based role in which you will be equipping youth ministries across Sydney with web-based communication/publishing tools and quality evangelical content.

If you have experience in:

• building dynamic websites using MVC-style PHP, Python or Java
• with a relational database (MySQL/PostgreSQL preferably, but it’s a clean slate!)
• publishing PDF documents securely online
• creating AJAX-powered interfaces securely
• connecting to 3rd party service providers using APIs (payment gateways, SMS, etc.)
• using code versioning systems (Subversion or CVS)

We’d love to hear from you.

Knowledge of frameworks such as Django, Struts or similar would be beneficial.

Learn more about the project at http://cyiada.com/

This high-visibility project would suit a young developer with a passion for sharing Christ and building up his disciples through the Internet.

Interested applicants please email joinus.code@cyiada.com

Josh Street
Anglican Youthworks | CYIADA Project

All for some American power-behind-the-throne. If he’s going to be the key string-puller, he should at least stay invisible so we don’t need to concern ourselves with his (admittedly unwelcome) presence.

They were blocking all useful traffic (but letting private cars through? Bizarre…), and claimed to have been using sniffer dogs on the cars they were letting through. Yeah, right. I didn’t see a single dog last night. I was wearing a backpack the whole evening. OH, LOOK, THERE GOES A TERRORIST!

No-one stopped me…

Then, after having blocked off half of the northern CBD, police stop a protest from going ahead on the grounds that it’s going to cause traffic chaos. Like that was a consideration a few nights back.

And, whilst I’m on this little soapbox, what on earth is a “lawful protest” about? “Oh, here you go, protest in a nice little out –of-the-way place where no-one can see you, much less be seen by the person you’re protesting about/to. Just… stay away from the Rocks and everything’ll be okay.”

Because I’ve seen so many rabid gun-toting uni-students trying to blow up the US puppetmaster. Nevermind that Australia has far-more-sane gun-control legislation than the US does… John Howard isn’t the centre of all this rubbish when he travels to the US, even, and yet over here we’ve got to keep unarmed protestors a good couple of kilometers from their target in case they pull out… well, something.

Meanwhile, I don’t know whether I should be satisfied or frustrated that I was wearing a conspicuous black backpack all evening around various protest sites and didn’t get glanced at once.

Go home, Cheney. You’ve wasted enough of Sydney’s time and resources already.

Actually, that’s a lie, but I’m feeling a little vitriolic (oxymoron?). Ubuntu didn’t work at all, and of a sudden CentOS did. It’s not quite as polished but I could grow to love it (maybe). I just need to look past this whole RPM thing, which really is ugly compared to the breadth and depth of apt options available. IMO, of course. And the whole ports gig just scares me so I’m gonna stay away from FreeBSD here for a while longer (until this one breaks in another two years?)

I’d forgotten how much work I’d put into making Samba shares behave as well as they had been for the last forever, too. And was convinced there was nothing of value left on the computer (I didn’t delete the home directories, just in case… that was really easy because they’re even on a physically separate volume, it was basically less effort to just leave them there) and consequently (yet again) deleted a MySQL database with StuffOfValue™ in it. In this case a CYIADA survey database I’d built because there were no other options available and (you probably guessed it) I hadn’t sorted out hosting by IT at work yet.

So the aim now is to setup a similarly solid server that’ll last me another two years, barring hardware upgrades (this thing desparately needs more RAM even though it’s got half a gig–I have no idea where it all goes). This time around it’ll be more web-production-esque in its role, which basically means it’ll have more than just being a quiet Samba PDC and file server and web dumping ground on its plate, at least until everything I’ve got planned for it today reaches maturity, or my situation changes to the point that paying for a VPS or real dedicated server somewhere else is a viable option. Loki does, indeed, work quite well, but I can’t screw with it quite as much as some things make me want to (not that I’d want to do that to Loki… in between catastrophic hardware failure it’s amazingly stable and the lack of general screwing-around-ness is probably a big part of that! Probably… :P)

No aspirations surrounding the idea of a media server this time around. Though there’s a possibility I’ll look at maybe building a terabyte RAID server later this year, which would mean rethinking whisper’s role somewhat. It’d probably be relocated to downstairs (it’s cooler there) and replaced by a case with better ventilation and requiring better ventilation. The EPIA board I’ve got isn’t passively cooled, but I reckon it can deal with getting toasty that much more because it’s got a fan stuck to it. It’s a borderline fan requirement, anyway — the hard drives get hotter than the processor (highest I’ve seen the drives is about 62° C, the processor would only hit 55, tops) on forty-something degree Sydney days. If the storage upgrade is called for I’d probably look at getting something with a bit more grunt though, just because if the space requires better ventilation then that lets me stop constraining the system power according to temperature!

Anyway. Now I’m a CentOS kid. Which makes me feel kinda dirty inside because of the whole Prominent North American Upstream Provider All In Title Case issue, but I think I can live with myself for the time being.

Taken from Ellen’s house (thanks Ellen :D) Just for kicks, see if you can compare the first shot in this post (5 minutes before any fireworks) to a similarly composed photo later on, paying special attention to the amount of clouds visible. Somehow I don’t reckon they’re buying carbon credits for this $AU4M detonation.

The fireworks themselves were crap… we were all left wondering if something else was going to happen (that being the symbolism of the question mark?) … but then perhaps the question mark was meant to be something else. I was waiting for it to flash up the letters “LOLHAX” in succession. That would have made me giggle so much I would have fallen off the pier, but not before snapping plenty of photos of it ;-)

So, who’s up for bridge-hacking/culture-jamming to an audience of a quarter of Sydney’s population next year?