AUSTRALIA PRESS: Telstra To Charge More For Fixed Lines

great - I get to pay more for a service I DON’T WANT! I just want internet, not a phone line (which I aparrently have to have to get ADSL).

On an internal list, a thread switched over to breifly mentioning the film Munich which incidently, I saw a few weeks ago just after linux.conf.au and really enjoyed.

I thought it was really well done and a good film. I really recommend going to see it - it’s a good cinematic experience. Possibly don’t see it if you’re feeling really sad though - not exactly a happy film. Eric Bana and Geoffrey Rush are superb in this film (both Aussies too!).

I found it to be more about his journey than anything else and enjoyed it as it was a personal story.

Oh, and why haven’t Margaret and David reviewed it yet? I would love to know what they thought. It’s not often I see a film before I’ve seen them review it :)

On the MySQL Cluster Forum, there was a thread “any production clusters yet?” to which this was a reply

I’m using NDB in production with a high-traffic web site. We have about 500,000 members and lots of surge activity at specific times. What I’m finding is that the web server goes but the cluster doesn’t break a sweat.

sweet.

ticketmaster.com.au - The White Stripes

Damn, damn, damn, damn damn. Only January 28th - and I’m in NZ.

Note to future organisers: make sure dates don’t overlap BDO or any really cool band tour dates.

Of course, the real disaster would be if Tool were touring at the same time as a work thing. How will people take it if i leave a company event for however long is needed to see Tool live. as many times as possible. I am dearly hoping that travel co-ordinates itself to see them in different cities, countries. Heck, even another planet if we can do that by the time the new album is ready :)

Some people don’t seem to get the Tool thing. It’s just good music. But that’s the …

that is all.

err… okay, a bit more. Breakfast this morning consisted of doing the dishes (good first step), some toast with jam and vegemite and a mango. Yum. All the time listening to the recording of the company-wide conf call from the other day (2am was just a little bit late that night).

These conf calls are really good actually - being able to throw questions directly at the top (and have them answered) is a great thing. Also getting to know what is going on from a higher perspective is really valuable.

At AUUG2005 last week, Arjen, myself and others were discussing the idea of trying to assemble some sort of common resources that multiple projects can use to contribute and find out about portability issues they stumble across.

The idea being that we can all then learn from each other and write better, more portable software.

So, I’ve set something up.

I present, the incredibly bare (okay, not quite completely bare) PortaWiki.

Please add whatever stuff you find, you know or anything. No idea how this is going to work - I plan to let it evolve.

(Arjen tells me that Peter Gutmann should receive credit as he thinks he came up with the idea. Kudos to him).

http://www.flamingspork.com/portawiki/

I can now give presentations from my laptop - yay.

It requires running the ATI binary drivers instead of the open source ones.

Then VGA out works without being squiggly. (that’s on my Asus V6V laptop with a Radeon X600 running Ubuntu Breezy) - there’ that should be enough google juice.

However, as if being binary only wasn’t crappy enough - suspend doesn’t work. So it’s open source drivers for all other times! I don’t use GL, so that doesn’t worry me. Of course, it may start to worry me what with all the neat cairo stuff and other accelleration coming… but not yet.

This should come in handy for the Melbourne MySQL Users Group meeting tomorrow night!

Microsoft loses in Eolas patent ruling | CNET News.com

Come on Microsoft - join us in the fight against software patents. This clearly hurts the entire industry - be it big vendors like yourself or small ones.

Let’s not all get royally screwed.

When a comment above a function says “returns -1 on error” and the code does the exact oposite (returns -1 anyway except if there was out of memory error, which may be #defined to -1 anyway) it’s a bit annoying when you first look at it.

Remember kids, comments in code are evil. They are wrong - or misleading at best. They only ever say what one person at some point in the past thought they beleived the code did. The definitive record is the code itself.

(there are possible exceptions to this rule… maybe… internals can be good to document - but arguably it should be *away* from the code so that you don’t start thinking the documentation is accurate and up to date - because it’s not).

Well, this review over at ZDnet seems to say that the Bose Quiet Comfort 2 Acoustic Noice Cancelling headphones have leather. The suck. Well, that strikes them off my list.

In case you didn’t know, I don’t do the leather thing.

There’s also a disturbing review over at Amazon from a guy who seems to know what he’s talking about (Grado make great ‘phones - mine are supurb).

So, the sound quality may not be all that great (although people rave about the …