• 25 February 2009 08:25pm: Lost contact with my network back in Wyoming... again. I hate you Big Pond. You can bite me.
• Today at 04:10pm: Swim in the ocean, and I am as good as new.
• Today at 05:40pm: First time at chatswood station when they are using all four platforms. Some of us thought we'd never live to see the day.
• Today at 05:43pm: I've seen old photos of this station when it was nice. Now it is all concrete and no character.

twitter.com/plicease

• 11 February 2009 03:30pm: Is there NOTHING that will covert a flow tools file into IPFIX? Without UDP buffer overruns? Of course? It's always the UDP buffer overruns.
• 12 February 2009 07:14am: Suddenly Google talk is working with my Jabber server again. Awesome guys only took you forever and a day.
• 13 February 2009 10:16pm: Annoyed I found a bunch of E-6 to scan this weekend but I left it at The Point and the scanner and I are in Wyoming :(
• Yesterday at 11:25am: I just blew my share of the federal stimulus handout on camera gear and I haven't even gotten it yet.
• Today at 10:01am: the graveyard looks pretty after rain with the sun shining on it.
• Today at 11:10am: it's like we have our weekly meeting every week now. crazy.
• Today at 11:26am: Lenny is finally blessed as stable. We've been using it production for over a year.

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Work has been keeping me pretty busy, and while I still find the regime in control of the network at Company 2 to be on the oppressive side, I am enjoying playing with foreign language input methods. I have been tasked with making software tools usable by native Chinese speakers. I have always been interested in how people interact with computers and technology, and when you take away all of the assumptions (which I have always lived with) which come along with English, things become a little more interesting.

(中文 stuff)

My knowledge of Chinese is itty-bitty, but just the fact that I can sort of distinguish different forms of Chinese from each other and from other Asian languages excites me. Maybe someday I will find the time to properly study Chinese. I think it would be a fun and useful thing to know. I almost picked up a Chinese language Sydney paper at the newsagent last night just to study the characters.

Last night I went back to Sydney Uni for "Trivia Night." It was pretty fun, we had pizza and answered trivial questions. The one question I got "wrong" was something that I really should have gotten right. The correct answer was either SGML or HTML, but I was pretty sure that HTML didn't exist in the 1980s (as specified in the question), where as I knew that SGML (on which HTML is based) had been around since the 80s. I just checked on Wikipedia, and sure enough the first specification documents for HTML date back to 1993. The reason I should have known that the "right" answer was HTML is because non-IT people with whom I was playing would be more likely to recognize the term HTML than SGML. I mean, SGML - what's that?

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them...To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing them, to forget any facts which become inconvenient.

George Orwell 1984

Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction and division of society.

John Adams

Doublethink is also the name I chose for my web server at work. It is named for the application it runs, which collates information collected by BigBrother (a component of our tool software which tracks usage) and presents it in a readable way. At some point I inherited a Twiki which is also hosted on doublethink (the machine).

Last year when complaints about the web servers performance were made, I said that the machine needed to be put on a faster network. There is no technical reason why this cannot be done. When I'm at home and I need a new fast Ethernet port, I go to Best Buy and purchase one... here is one for $39.99 [broken link]. The reason this cannot be done at work is that there is security on the port at work so that the IT department can charge us per computer instead by bandwidth. Charging by bandwidth would make sense, since that is the service they are providing, not use of the computer. That is neither hear nor there.

So, as mentioned earlier, there was an "experiemnt" on Wednesday to see if the web server would run faster, as I said it would, on the faster network. The LAN team's position is that the performance problems have nothing to do with bandwidth, but the speed of the machine. Put succinctly, this is rubbish. I knew this, but I ran the test anyway, and sure enough twiki and doublethink (the application) ran much faster on the faster network than it had on the slower network.

I felt vindicated by this result and assumed that we could now push to get port security turned off in my office. I know this has happened for other high priority projects, and now that the managers are using twiki, this has become a high priority.

The guy who is spearheading this little adventure just came by my office to tell me that they are getting me a new computer to replace doublethink (the server). Normally this would fill me with rage because they are obviously not listening to me, but because of recent events I view the entire affair with a rather comforting sense of detachment. Why should I complain, after all, if they give me a new computer? Even if I didn't ask for it.

Still the original doublethink - still humming underneath my desk for now - and I have been through a lot and it will be sad to see her go.

So we did an "experiment" at work today. Just to let you know the results, the web server was faster on the faster network than it was on the slower network. I realize this shouldn't come as any surprise, but for some reasons this is surprising to people around here.