Santorini/Ios 2009 – Party Mix
by galen on Nov.02, 2009, under Travel
I promised my travelling buddies that i’d put together a cd of the music we heard during our recent Ios/Santorini holiday.
cocktail in santorini
Native Garden – A Year on Part 2
by galen on Sep.16, 2009, under Gardening, Natives
It’s been just over a year since the last Native garden post. A very long summer followed after the last big planting in 2008. Had a few casualties, a few surprise success stories and a fair amount of satisfaction.
Public Liability – following the wrong guys
by galen on Jul.15, 2009, under Rant
One thing that is blatantly obvious is Europe compared to back home in Australia is that everything is much less restricted. Much less a nanny state.
To me it all boils back to one fundamental change of tact where we followed USA down the path of public liability. This seemingly fair system seems to have long reaching consequences to lifestyle as a whole to everyday people.
First some examples.
I was on a train the other day, a small train that winds its way up into some Spanish mountains to a small Spanish village. The train was an old quaint train that let you completely open the windows to enjoy the ride. I thought this was a great idea so i proceeded to open the window.. stick my head out…and nearly got myself decapitated by a passing pole. Idiot. After calming down i thought it was still great that you can open the windows regardless of the inherent risk involved in doing so. If you were a fucken idiot and lost a limb from sticking it out the window then.. well.. that’s really your problem. The point of relevance is that this would never happen in australia. There aint no fucken way that window would of been open-able so a person could lose a limb. Public liability would say that the train operators were responsible for their patrons (even the fucken idiots) and therefore to cover their asses they would ensure that the train was as idiot proof as possible. Hence… no open windows, and any quaint train rides to Australian mountains would be significantly less enjoyable. Hrmm.
Another example…
There are no fucken bouncers here. I hate bouncers. The reason bouncers are so prevalent at every Australian bar boils once again back to public liability. It is *NOT* because there are more fuckwit drunks in Perth, it is because if anyone is king hit, gets injured, slips over while drunk the establishment could get sued. The bouncers sole job is to remove any patrons that could get hurt out onto the street and out of the realm of responsibility of the bar. The manner and technique they employ to fulfill this goal is usually very distasteful.
I fucken hate bouncers.
This is just two examples but i could rattle of cases all day.
Europe is seemingly far more liberal, far more common sense approach. Far less regulated nanny-state. There isn’t a “family first” political party proposing an internet filter to ‘protect the children’, the idea is the parents should do that job.
It’s refreshing, really. And given time to ponder how we as Aussies ended up in such a shit situation, it’s because we followed the wrong group. The yanks, the founders of public liability.
Connectivity while Travelling
by galen on Jun.18, 2009, under I.T.
With a week to go before we depart on our EuroTrip i have been setting up my Asus EEE to have all the connectivity tools a young-technologically-savvy traveller could need.
Everything is running on my Asus 1000HE running Windows 7 RC1. I am so far pretty impressed with Windows 7 and have migrated most machines in the house to use thee new OS. My serious development laptop still uses Ubuntu and will remain that way but at least it feels like Windows 7 is much better step in the right direction compared to the abortion that is Vista.
Windows Live Writer
This is the only Windows Live product I’m going to use. So far it looks pretty good, the ability to be able to write up blog entries while offline is something that has a big appeal to me during the long flights and rail trips. For kicks i also installed Messenger only to immediately uninstall this piece of crap when i saw the rampant advertising used. I normally use an old version of trillian pro. I think version 3, it does everything i want in an IM client while having a minimalistic skin. Works well.
Google Picasa
I absolutely love Picasa for my photo management and don’t use anything else. While I think Google missed the boat with Web Photo Albums due to the Facebook revolution. It is possible to get a Facebook image exporter added into Picasa to be able to quickly update Facebook. I am going to look for a Gallery plugin for my plug and have that update Facebook i think. Need to investigate this further.
Garmin Mobile PC
Armed with this software, a USB GPS receiver and the Europe 2009 maps i should be able to navigate the streets of Europe well enough. Our plan is to hire a car in Nice and drive around France a bit. I will be concentrating on driving on the wrong side of the road too much to worry about directions so this should be helpful.
Microsoft OneNote 2007
Came with my MSDN subscription, this is another MS program that i really like. We have all our travel notes, itineries, e-tickets and what not stored in various folders within one note. The ability to easily do a video/voice recording is pretty cool as well. Also being able to make nifty little ‘To-Do’ lists has really helped with the organising.
Anyways this is my first post from Live writer so it’s more of a proof of concept to see how well it hooks into WordPress. ta ta.
Native Garden – New Species Part 1
by galen on Aug.22, 2008, under Gardening, Natives
It’s been 10 months since we purchased the house, but I’ve only added to the native garden during winter. Over the next few posts i’ll list some of the introduced species.
| Name | Common Name | Quantity |
| Boronia alata |
Winged Boronia | 1 |
| Boronia megastigma |
Brown Boronia | 2 |
| Boronia heterophylla (and crosses) |
‘Lipstick’ x 1, Jackos Special x 2, Purple Jared x 2 | 5 |
| Eucalyptus torquata |
Coral Gum | 1 |
| Banksia hookeriana |
Hookers Banksia | 1 |
| Kunzea baxteri |
Solomans Pink | 1 |
| Westringia dampieri |
1 | |
| Hakea laurina |
Pincushion Hakea | 1 |
| Grevillea trifida |
1 |
We had a Boronia megastigma in one of my childhood gardens and I can distinctly remember the wonderful spicy smell. I don’t believe I have enjoyed the same aroma since my childhood. Consequently, these were pretty much the first plants that I put in. Hopefully by spring the whole street will be able to enjoy the scent!
The coral gum, with shade at the moment, but this position is mostly full sun.
The Coral Gum is being planted towards the front corner of the garden, on the same side as the existing established Jacaranda tree. My front yard is divided into two pretty distinct sections. Full-Sun, on the western side and part-sun/full-shade on the eastern side under the Jacaranda. From my experience over last summer, the full-sun side gets absolutely baked and i personally worry that even plants labeled for “full sun” wont survive those conditions easily. My plan is to get a fast growing shrub up as quick as possible on the western side to provide some shade.
With the exception of the Boronias, all these plants are pretty hardy and once established shouldn’t require much management, I hope.
B.Megastigma, with a heavy mulch of cardboard, river pebbles and black mulch.
The Boronias on the other hand will be given the utmost TLC. They have been heavily mulched and have even had river pebbles mixed into the soil to help in keeping it cool over summer. A rudimentary “sheet mulching” technique was used with all my spare cardboard boxes flattened out and layered across the existing ‘jungle mulch’. A new layer of black mulch was then thickly layered over the top. Since the Boronias require consistent cool and moist conditions, I hope this heavy mulching approach will pay off come summer.
Boronia patch, having shade provided by either the veranda or the jacaranda most of the time.
Nurseries used:
Lulfitz
Western Flora
Guildford Town Garden Centre
Native Garden – Existing Species
by galen on Aug.22, 2008, under Gardening, Natives
These are the species that came with the property, they had only been freshly planted as part of the ‘home improvements’ the previous owners did. I didn’t mind because they are all ‘water wise’ and will fit in for my grander plans of a native garden.
*Species marked with an star are exotic and not native.
| Name | Common Name | Quantity |
| Acacia Cognata | Limelight | 7 |
| Anigozanthus | Dwarf Kangaroo Paw | 6 |
| Calocephalus | Silver Nugget | 8 |
| Dampiera diversifolia |
Kangaroo Lobelia | 2 |
| Darwinia citriodora |
Lemon Scented Darwinia | 4 |
| Pimelea ferruginea |
Pink Rice Flower | 3 |
| Westringia fruiticosa |
Australian Rosemary | 2 |
| Scaevola striata |
2 | |
| *Convolvulus cneorum |
Silver Bush | 6 |
| *Variagated Flax |
Dianella ‘Border Gold’ | 8 |
| *Dietes vegetata |
Iroides | 4 |
| *Lavendula ‘Belle Purple’ |
Dwarf Lavendar | 8 |
The is how the property looked when we bought it. The front yard was made 'water wise' as part of the previous owners improvements.
Vista x64 – My thoughts on being bent over the barrel.
by galen on Jul.31, 2007, under Vista x64
I got a couple of vista with my MSDN subscription. I have a $6,000 AUD DELL laptop. The XPS M1710, with absolutely all the fruit. This surely would be enough to power vista?
The Setup:
- Vista Ultimate x64
- System/Development Utilities
- Visual Studio 2005 (32Bit)
- Avast for anti virus (32Bit)
- Acronis for backups (32Bit)
- Microsoft Office Ultimate (32Bit)
- General Utilities
- Nokia PC Suite (32Bit)
- MediaMonkey (32Bit)
- Foxit Reader (32Bit)
- Development VMWare Server with a guest OS of: Windows 2003
- SQL Server 2005 developer edition
- mySQL 5.0
- IIS 6.0
My experiences so far:
- things are slow, real slow im only using 2GB of ram and suspect 4GB will be mandatory
- as you can see from the list of “general” apps, there is still not enough native 64bit native apps out there
- adobe should hang themselves for nothing having flash for x64 browsers making using IE x64 pointless
Bugs / Annoyances
- typing commands in command prompt hangs sometimes
- trying to get the run command up hangs sometimes (2-5mins)
- wireless WPA1 seems to be borked, i have to attempt to connect several times and when i’m lucky it will work
- boot up, shut down is very very slow
Good Points
- it is pretty
- once everything is loaded it doesnt feel that slow (not counting the occasional hangs with run and command prompt)
Rebinding to an XmlDataSource in .NET 2.0
by galen on Oct.06, 2006, under Development
This damn problem had me baffled for an entire wasted day. I had a simple XmlDataSource binding to a GridView. However when changes to the data source were made, the gridview seemed to retain its databinding to the previous datasource.
The problem lay with the XmlDataSource control having the EnableCaching property set to True by default. Toggeling this option resolved the issue. Thankyou .NET for a wasted day of development.
Dim xmlDs As New XmlDataSource
With xmlDs
.EnableCaching = False
.Data = XMLHelper.SerializeObjectToXML(LeadMgmtController.Data.Data, GetType(Leads), True)
.XPath = “LeadViews/LeadView”
.TransformFile = “~/xslt/leadview.xslt”
.DataBind()
End With
Google News – Unable to remove ‘Top Stories’
by galen on Jun.02, 2006, under Google
Like most people I really like google news. In particular the ability to customize the news that is relevent to me. Effectively making a news portal of the news that you want to see. This is unless you do not want to see googles ‘Top Stories’. I dont. Infact I am sick of the crap that has been selected as googles ‘top stories’ for the day. You can not help but feel there is very much a political influence involved in what is regarding as the top stories for google news. I decided to email google about this.
Hello Google,
I have much admiration for the power and ease of use of google news and
have been using the application for some time.
I have a single major annoyance with the customization features offered
and that is the inability to remove the ‘Top Stories’ block under the my
news customization. Not only can i not hide the block, i seem to be unable
to even relegate the block to the bottom and unviewed area of the page.
I have faith that the google devs are not forcing users a mandatory
placement of top stories in the centre of the screen as this would be a
major annoyance for people like myself who are not interested in the
‘progress in iraq’, or ‘the looming terrorist nation of iran’, or ‘dick
cheeney shoots a man in the face’.
I am an australian and care little for news outside of my local region. I
would like to place the news stories relevent to me in the centre/top of
the my customized google news view and hide the ‘top stories’ block
completely.
Could i please be advised if this is possible, and if not why the
functionality has been overlooked.
Kind Regards
Galen Parker
Their response unsuprisingly was thus;
Hi Galen,
Thank you for your note. We don’t currently offer a way to remove or edit
the ‘Top Stories’ section, but we’ll keep your suggestion to offer this in
mind. User feedback is very important to us, and we hope you’ll visit
Google News in the coming months to see our additions and improvements.
Regards,
The Google Team
So there you have it. Users who are not interested in what google considers its ‘Top Stories’ (for whatever reasons) are forced through the inability to hide/move the block. I have stopped using google news for this fact. I have worked around the problem by making a customised google home page (Personalised Home) and linked the RSS feeds of the news sources relevent to me. Its a damn shame that this is the only way to avoid what appears really to be a political (propaganda?) restriction on google news.
nForce3 250GB – Ethernet Adapter in Windows x64
by galen on Feb.02, 2006, under Windows x64
I have been playing a fair bit with windows x64 in recent weeks and thought it would be a good idea to blog some of the problems that have been encountered when using the 64bit version of windows xp.
I have a DFI Lanparty UT board which utilises the nForce3 250GB architecture. To get my onboard ethernet adapter to work I had to use the drivers from the nForce4 driver pack instead of the nForce3 Forceware drivers provided.
Grab the latest nForce3 pack from guru3d here use this for everything except the network adapter.
I then used this nforce4 pack for my network adapter.
