A lot of time at University was spent playing around with Unix, reading UNIX Network Programming Volumes One AND Two. I still have those books, they pretty much taught me how the internet really works and still believe anyone who hasn’t read them still wouldn’t really understand or appreciate it.

A command that I used a lot back in those days was kill. It is used to send signals to processes and was particularly useful for killing processes that wouldn’t die (programming error or otherwise). The command kill -9 sends a non-blocking signal to a process telling it to die, here’s a screenshot of me killing an apache instance for no particular reason other than to show it in action -

Anyway, a rapper named ‘Monzy’ has created this song about it which is about as geeky as you can get, other than my fsck t-shirt -

After an extrodinarily long time without comments on the blog (thanks to 10,000 spam messages and akismis not really picking them all up) you can now add comments thanks to a system called disqus which will hopefully end spam, here’s a screenshot of it in action -

Welcome back comments!

Future of the internet is here! Twinkle is a new application for the iPhone that lets you see who is using twitter within a range of km of where you are, it uses your current mobile mast position to roughly locate you. Not only will it let you find new friends but it will also make it possible to find out what is going on in the area you are in. The possibilities of this are endless, image how useful this might have been in London during the terrorist attacks the hours of not knowing what was going on may have shrunk as people posted messages about what they heard, of course on the flip side it may have made it worse with conflicting stories etc… I imagine for the geek crowd this will be handy trying to work out where everyone is going for the conference after party. Here’s a screenshot of it in action -

I set my distance to 1000km for that screenshot but there’s some people using it within 4 miles of me!

On a separate note I started twitlinks.com this evening, it is a simple site I wrote in my spare time for getting tech. news out of twitter faster. I gave RWW the exclusive to it, check it out at twitlinks.com Andres, the South American artist genius did the logo for it -

Checkout Anhdres.com for more drawings

As my parents “jolly well” know, I have a bad habit of leaving lights on. Even writing this now it’s obvious I’ve left the hall light on, serving no purpose but to make my life a little bit easier when I walk through to the kitchen a bit later. In the other room there are two laptops both switched on (for work), and in this room there’s another laptop with a 27″ monitor that is on for most of the day. So whenever we get the electricity bill I always get a little bit worried about how much its going to be.

Our average daily usage is 11kWh which is almost half the Australian average but then again we live in a one bedroom apartment.

What interested me most though about this bill is it included this little mention of how much CO² was getting pumped into the atmosphere because of my inability to switch off lights, it comes in at a wapping one long ton!

So I decided to look into what the equivalence of was compared to something else I know is bad for the envionment. I found a calculator which works out totals for all of the flying we’ve done in the past 3 months (including the UK) and it comes in at ten long tons which although is a lot isn’t as much as I thought it would be. So I am going to make a more conservative effort to turn off lights when we are not using them from now on.

I used terrapass flight calc. to work out my emissions.

My $99 Nokia phone starting cutting out of phone calls after about 30 seconds, it was a bit frustrating to say the least. So I decided I would get the jesus phone but would wait for the official version to arrive here in Australia. I waited, waited some more and then waited loads. I finally got fed up with the Nokia and fed up with Telstra and fed up with Apple and purchased one of the unlocked versions from the USA.

Opening the box -

And finally when its all up and running, checking the stock prices -

So far to say its been brilliant and the 3rd party support in Australia is also brilliant! The other night we had dinner with Simone and Stu and a song came on and we were trying to think of the name of the song, so I knocked it into Google, connected to the Telstra EDGE network and I had it (All-4-One was the name in the end).

The internet is becoming more and more social and friendfeed provides a one stop location to aggregate all of your social data. For example, it can create a feed of all of the ‘things’ you do on the internet which include blogging, uploading pictures, bookmarking sites, favourting youtube videos etc..

I want to get this information onto the blog a lot like yongfook has done, thankfully friendfeed now provide an API and a man named Adrián Moreno has already started a wordpress widget.

I jazzed up his widget slightly so that is fits in with the scheme of this website, you can see it in the side bar under ‘LifeStream’ or by looking at the image below -

I knocked this up pretty quickly so you may be annoyed to know it uses tables rather than some elegant CSS div positioning and it also only supports the services that I actually use on friendfeed. But hey, that is why I’ve linked to the source - so you can add to it or redesign it completely!

Get the source here friendfeed_widget_g2007.zip 13kb

This is a resurrected post from moving hosts (thanks to Google Cache) -

We recently got some new technology and games as valentines day gifts, Amy got one of these cool gadgets -

iPod Nano - Playing Seal Rocks Movie

I converted the seal rocks video into ‘MP4′ H.264 video format for the ipod and it looks and plays great (if not a bit cropped due to the 16:9 aspect ratio of the video camera).

After dabbling with the little helicopters you can get on ebay for $30, Amy got me one of these more expensive 4 channel helicopters, which are the real deal. It has full throttle, rudder, elevator and aileron controls. It is called the Blade CX2 and it is brilliant. It also has a fifth channel if I want to install some other device.

Here it is on a test flight in the bedroom -

On Saturday morning, we got up early and went down to 40 Baskets Reserve which is an open park near our flat for an outdoor flight. It was all going great until I got a bit too confident and took the helicopter up high, then for whatever reason, an engineering fault over pilot area in my opinion, it fell to the ground with a thud. Fortunetly it wasn’t too broken, the plastic body was a bit ripped but it still worked. Then a dog took interest in it as it was flying and bit into it in mid air, which hurt the dogs nose I suspect as the blades were still spinning.

So on its first outdoor flight I’ve had to order a replacement shell. Owning helicopters is a bit like owning a Ferrari, you only get one if you can afford two of them!

Following on from my previous excitement of USD vs. AUD comes the rather sad news that the sterling is at a ten year low against the Australian Dollar -

GBP vs. AUD 1997 - 2008

The last time the pound was as weak as this was 1997. The USD is also the weakest it has been against AUD before I was even at high school and as far as I could make the chart go back -

AUD vs. USD 1990 - 2008

Charts from the excellent fxtop.com

PS. The reason there’s not been much updates is due to the camera dropping incident in Prague - a new sturdier camera has been choosen - the Olympus MJU 790 SW which is shock proof and water proof - the real test is if it will be us proof! (purchase depends on occurence of global financial meltdown or not).

What has the world of professional journalism come to when the top story on news.com.au, a Rupert Murdoch owned news website, publishes a story about an argument on wikipedia in relation to the existence of a page setup for Corey Delaney, the kid from Melbourne who had a party that got out of hand.

The News.com.au Wikipedia Story, the Wikipedia Discussion Page

The classic post, see also - Best of 2004, Best of 2005 and Best of 2006.

	Album of the Year - MIA - Kala Sadly it pipped Smashing Pumpkin’s Zeitgeist to the post, actually it didn’t stand a chance. This South East London / Sri-Lankan artist is keeping it real and has some excellent tracks. My favourite track is Paper Planes on this album.
	Cinema Trip of the Year - 300 I didn’t see enough films at the cinema this year as I’ve found it very hard to pick a favourite. Amy and I saw 300 at the cinema in Byron Bay when we went there for Easter, the special effects were amazing but suttle at the same time, even though the world of 300 is completely surreal. A very interesting film and highly recommended.
	DVD of the Year - The Life and Death of Peter Sellers I only saw this film recently and thought it was totally amazing. The acting is great and the story of Peter Sellers’ life is extraordinary. Sellers died four hours after I was born so I was intrigued to see this film and it didn’t disappoint. An extremely interesting life story about a very complicated man.
	Book of the Year - The Business Rules The Business Rules: The 7 Irrefutable Laws that Determine All Business Success - is probably the best book I’ve read all year. It contains a lot of common sense guidelines that I recommend if you ever consider or do actually run your own business.
	Game of the Year - FIFA 2008 This game is truely brilliant, it makes you feel like a pro even though you are probably helped along by the AI of the game. When you hit the post from a long shot volley, you actually believe it was entirely your doing. The WII controls are excellent as well.
	Website of the Year - Facebook.com Kind of a “friends reunited / blog / social experiment” mashup that works really well. I’ve got back in contact with people I never thought I’d here from again. The ability to upload pictures and videos to the system and tag people is extremely clever. Some people think their targetted advertising is an invasion of privacy, but for me to be able to target surfers with my surf forecasts application is an extremely handy tool.