Category: Geek

You know, I was going to post a long and rambling commentary on today’s audio wasteland known as ‘ambient’ music, when this wonderful technological advancement was revealed. It sated my bloodlust and expressed the disdain on my behalf most eloquently. (via Synthtopia)

Seems every few couple of years, my hosting company seems to enjoy locking the site away for a week or two. Always a concern, seeing that occasionally, it’s deleted completely, but it appears that the site is back and running.
I say ‘appeared’, because no-one has told me what is happening on the hosting side of things. Poor, poor, poor service.
Might take that backup, now. Any suggestion for replacement hosts, folks?

Today, we dip into the mailbag to answer this query from Jodie:

On checking out Scrobel [sic], I was amused and enjoyed a giggle of the years that have passed since I played the game.
I’m a little disappointed the the spelling is wrong of the game title. As I
don’t know who provided you with the info, and as you too claim
friendship with Darryl and Gary, I would be happy to hear from you if
you desire the correct spelling. Jodie.

Yes, Jodie – although we’ve had the page up for many years, and have actually had the inventors contribute, we’ve never questioned the spelling, which is kinda ironic. I too recall seeing this spelling somewhere, and am happy to update the pages.
It’s probably just as well, too. Other meanings for the original spelling have cropped up over the years, not all of them are family-friendly.
Thanks for setting us straight!

Regarding Google Street View:

“If someone wants to find out where I live, they’ll figure it out eventually” – Karl Stefanovic
“Yeah, Exactly” – Random IT Consultant

If you’re able to use this service to find out secret information about where people live, you’re doing pretty well. Way to go, Channel 9.

It must be my birthday! Finally, Google Street View is available in Australia. And, like many people, the first place I googled was My Place.
And, thankfully, we passed our secret digital muster – no-one was out front doing anything they weren’t supposed to be doing. The lawn was presentable. As near as I can tell, it was taken at the start of the year.
This is a pretty amazing effort by Google. A large chunk of WA has been photographed at street-view, not just Perth. Now we can go for a virtual drive about the state, if we want to.
Team Street View with Google Earth, and you have a pretty amazing 3D representation of Earth, from both Space and Street. If I can’t have a jetpack, this is probably the next best thing.
I still don’t understand how they’re making any money, but I really enjoy the way Google throws this stuff out there for free. I wish them lots of success – whatever that means for them.
I still vividly remember a geography class in 1986 in which the teacher was explaining the shortfalls in map projection and why, for world maps to really be rendered correctly, someone would have to invent a book that allowed a globe to pop out of the page so you could see the world in three dimensions. I’d like to go back and study geography, now, please.
So, how did your place fare?

Phew. We can rest easy. Turns out the world won’t be ending this year when they turn on the Large Hadron Collider in Europe later this year. Seems we won’t be sucked into a black hole. Which would indeed suck a great deal.

In related science news, good to see we’re starting to figure out what glass is. Finally. Turns out that glass is indeed female, as the French suggests – it just can’t make up it’s mind whether it’s a liquid or a solid. Or it gets stuck in traffic jams easily. Or both.

Here’s one gadget you won’t get tired of – a GPS unit with the voice of KITT – the ‘Knight Rider’ car. I hope the engineer that thought of this one gets a raise.
However, I’m still holding out for a HAL9000 version. How cool would it be to try to take an unplanned side route and have it say ‘I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Dave’. Or, indeed, any of these would be awesome. If anyone is listening, yes, you can steal my idea.

Perth seems to want to shake its image as a ‘career limiting destination‘ (and the ‘unhappiest place on earth‘). A couple of announcements in the recent press have my techie-sense all tingly:

• Perth is the first Australian city to hook up Google Transit to the bus and rail timetables. We may not have the best or busiest public transport infrastructure on the planet, but it’s pretty easy to exactly how crap it is at any given point. I like having the ability to map out driving directions between two locations, and clicking a button to see how long the same trip would take by bus and rail.
  To be honest, though, the Transperth Journey Planner, on which the Google engine is based, is one of my favourite ‘where-you-live’ internet applications, along with good old TrafficCam, PerthCam, and the Perth Rain Radar (seldom used these days).
• They’re trying to brand Bentley as ‘Australia’s Silicon Valley‘ because someone installed some fat pipes to the internet (or, at least, promised to). Sounds like a good move, and I’m glad Fran Logan got to announce it – he shouted Ainslie and me Lunch at Parliament House a while back. Still, I don’t know that Perth is ready for it: we are still somewhere between 2 hours/4 hours/2 weeks behind the eastern seaboard at any given point. OK for miners, not so good for bitjockeys. And, to steal a comment from Anonymous:
  

  Silicon Valley has 6 universities, consists of some 15 odd towns and is home to thousands of ITC companies – large and small.Comparing it to Tech Park (42 hectares + 1 average university) is highly amusing.

It’s about the right time of year to get some long-neglected web projects out of the way:

• Like finally updating the code behind the ‘latest/greatest’ section to point to Amazon’s new eCommerce system. No big deal, but it was lots of fun digging through some old, rotten SOAP programming and updating it for the 21st century.
• Like finally updating the Family Tree to work again. I had some reformatting to do because of the new version of the genealogy software I use, and had neglected it for too long. I also had to remove some personal details that had crept in there by accident. Scarcely a week goes by that someone doesn’t email me with a distant link they have discovered. The internet rocks.

Some guys go out to the garage on their long weekends. I like to to keep the fingernails clean.