Planet SLUG May 12, 2008
Simon Rumble
Sun Lizard: any good?
%20on%20House-480px.gif)
We've been getting quotes for heating in our house, as it's starting to get cold. Initially we thought we'd go for a flued, fan-forced gas heater in the fireplace in the lounge room. A friend has the unflued gas heater recommended by Choice and it's brilliant. Heats her whole house really well. We figured flued because then the exhaust gases go outside.
Turns out gas heaters of this calibre, flued or unflued, are around $3,000 or more plus installation. Not cheap! So we decided to have a look at ducted heating, which if it comes in at under double that, I reckon isn't a bad deal since it would heat the whole house.
Now I've found The Sun Lizard which was featured on New Inventors. It uses heat from the sun to force warm air in or out of the house, depending on the season, and stores the heat in the thermal mass of the house. Given we're in a double-brick house, we've got plenty of thermal mass.
This claims to heat by 4-6° which sounds like it'd probably be enough most of the time for us. In addition, it cools by up to 10° in summer which would be a nice bonus. At under $3,000 it sounds like a nice option, and with no ongoing costs it's quite attractive.
But I'm not sure 4-6° is quite enough, even in Sydney's mild winters. I vowed when we bought a house to never spend another winter shivering with all my clothes on and a crappy electric heater sucking down expensive juice. This is the experience of poorly insulated, unheated rental properties for about a month a year in Sydney.
I wonder if the money we were thinking of spending on ducted heating might be better spent on a unit like this and upgrading our insulation. Get the roof vacuumed and the old insulation replaced with modern, high-spec insulation. As an added benefit, it would reduce plane noise. We're also looking into double glazing, which has benefits for both thermal and acoustic insulation. Perhaps with greatly-enhanced insulation and this unit, we could get by with a crappy electric heater used for only a few days a year?
So does anyone out there have any experience with this unit?
Ben Leslie
Flying
You would think after a few hundred flights and around 300,000 miles the wonder of flying would have worn off. And to a very large extent it has. There is nothing magical or exciting being stuck in a cramped narrow seat for 12 hours, but there are definitely times when you can't help but be amazed where technology and industralisation has got us.
Taking off for the first time on the massive double decker, super jumbo, A380 is definitely one of those experiences. Despite the solid engineering and science behind it, it is still pretty amazing when something that big actually gets of the ground. The fact that this aircraft is so quite when operating ust adds to the experience.
I was lucky enough to get a window seat on the upper deck on my flight from Sydney to Singapore last week. It was comfortable, seat, there is storage right next to you which is great, and the entertainment system is freaking cool. Nice, large crisp LCD screens, and a huge range of TV shows (I watched Buffy, and Bones), movies (I finally saw Juno), and multiplayer games (I cleaned up on Texas Hold-em). All in all, Singapore still gets my vote for best airline.
The next 10 flights (Singapore-Frankfurt, Frankfurt-Marseille, Marsielle-Munich, Munich-Berlin, Berlin-Copenhagen, Copenhagen-Helsinki, Helsinki-Frankfurt, Frankfurt-Zürich, Zürich-Washington D.C, Washington D.C-San Francisco), were nothing to write home about, I didn't get any upgrades, I went very close to missed connections, I ran out of battery on my laptop, all the usual things that make flying fun. I really must recommend not flying through Dulles. It took around 90 minutes to get though immigration, customs, baggage recheck, and security. It looked as though they were upgrading the airport, but if you are flying Europe to west coast US I'd recommend anywhere else, except maybe Denver where you are liable to get snowed in, or Chicago where you are likely to miss your connection. In fact just try and fly direct.
Thankfully after the 8 hours to east-coast plus 6 more hours to the west-coast, I was able to look forward to flying in business class home to Sydney. I'm not sure if it was the 14 hours of flying in economy, but this has been one of my most relaxed flights ever. For some reason the flight was basically empty, the business class cabin was only half-full, and I think anyone in economy probably got a row to themselves.
But none of that would usually inspire me to bother writing. What really did it was the view from the airplane at dawn. Seeing the sun rise of the horizon when you are flying 10km above the planet it pretty amazing when you think about it.
Trying to capture the view is not easy, while shooting out the plane window is not exactly ideal, I just don't think my point-and-shoot is up to it (blame the tools). Anyway, this photo is the best of the lot, it kind of works, but in real life, the blues are bluer, the sun a deeper orange, and the view far more expansive.
Rodger Dean
Icepodder 5.4 revision 64 for Mandriva 2008.1 Spring & PCLinuxOS 2007
This is one of my favourite, straight down the line podcast applications for the Linux Platform. Loving it so much I have done a personal build for Mandriva.
It is a simple aggregator and feeds and easily added. The Icepodder team have removed a lot of the old dependencies; pyxmms, python, libxml2.python. It easily It now allows you to open downloads into Amarok or a media player of you choice.
So sharing my joy. I have posted my Mandriva 2008.1 build including source for you Mandriva users to use and abuse. Please give any feed back to the Icepodder developers as they love to hear how much you enjoy Icepodder.
RPM: Mandriva 2008. 1 Icepodder 5.4 personal build revision 64
SRPM: Mandriva 2008.1 Icepodder 5.4 personal build revision 64 source
RPM: PCLinuxOS 2007 Icepodder 5.4 personal build revision 64
SRPM: PCLinuxOS 2007 Icepodder 5.4 personal build revision 64 source
To get the latest source:
svn co https://icepodder.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/icepodder icepodder
Mark Greenaway
Funny how being in a band gets you to start practicing again.Dave Airlie
running X as non-root - almost like the future or something...
So X servers run as root, and this isn't good, for many many reason, and it wasn't always this way on other UNIXes.So as part of my quick hacks work I got an accelerated X server on intel hw that ran as a user today.
The hacked up patches were around 300 lines total, one bit in the xserver, lots of non-root ioctl hacks to the drm and the intel driver had to register it wasn't a hw driver with X, and then fix up its buffer allocations to be non-evicted.
Surprisingly it mostly seems to work, I can start the server + gnome-session + DRI2 + compiz + glxgears on a cube, granted it oopses soon afterwards but it does show we are very close to realising the dream.
The xserver patch is in master, the drm patches are in modesetting-101 and the intel hacks are in the intel-kernelmode branch of my personal repo, as they are very hacky.
Lots of things need to be fixed so this can be done properly but it nice to just see what it looked like e.g. the frontbuffer isn't pinned properly or the cursors etc.
I have to log in on the console on vt2 and then run the following.
/opt/xorg/bin/Xorg -logfile ~/xorglog -sharevts -novtswitch vt02
Granted I'm not sure how reproducible this is, it was afternoon hacks to get over the F9 bugfixing :)
Roger Barnes
Photo of the day - 12 May 2008
Is it just me, or is the google treasure hunt not working for others too?
http://google-au.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-treasure-hunt.html
I solved the first puzzle, which leads to a site where I enter my details, but I can't seem to submit the answer to the next challenge. I get an HTTP 302 redirect that goes to a page that asks for a confirmation code that I never received, and sometimes I get a python error. Perhaps the challenge is to debug the "confnig" typo?
Update: It looks like my rediculously long (and wrong) answer contributed to the odd behaviour. Submitting a more realistic answer this morning worked fine.
May 11, 2008
Michael Fox
1080p bluray playback = sweet
Rewired our home theater setup and wired the PS3 into the TV. I must say I am very happy with the result. It worked perfectly fine. Bluray movie playback on the TV at 1080p is really sweet. It looks very good. The PS3 menu even looks a lot better, not to mention GTA IV.
Very happy with the result. All I need now is to test a few good Bluray movie titles. DVD upscaling is very good too, I think I will watch my DVD’s via the PS3 rather then via our Beyonwiz DP-S1.
Downloaded MediaLink for OSX and it seems to work really well. It implements a uPnP server on OSX for sharing out iTunes and iPhoto data, along with other folders of files as you select. Playback of content like DivX and XviD files is very nice. I think I’ll even purchase a license for MediaLink as it works without any effort.
May 10, 2008
Rodger Dean
Facebook life has begun
I’ve finally taken the full plunge into Facebook after friends and family found my account.
I am amazed at how easy it is to track down lost friends from years ago. Friends I went to Bible College with, who live oversea, old family friends, teacher even.
I consider Facebook to better than Myspace. it also seems to attract a more mature crowd.
So to those Facebookers out there. Happy Social Networking.
May 09, 2008
Simon Rumble
Malcolm Middleton: fantastic gig
Holly and I went to see Malcolm Middleton, formerly of Arab Strap at the Hopetoun last night. Brilliant gig! As well as the miserable Scot, the two support bands were excellent, which is refreshing as "Special Guests" are often lousy.
First up were PapavsPretty, a bunch of 17 year olds with amazing talent. Their cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart was excellent, and kids playing a Yamaha DX7 that's older than them is quite amusing.
Second was Sui Zhen, a woman with a voice somewhat like the woman from Lamb. Delicate but playful songs. Quite enjoyed it.
In between sets we got talking to a couple of Belfast lads. Metal fan Mick of the cliched name looked a lot like Hank Von Helvete from Turbonegro, though I didn't point out that they're a Norwegian gay metal band.
Finally out came the miserable Scot. Brilliant, as always. He's a genius with an acoustic guitar, and the Prozac clearly isn't working.
The photo? From the dunnies at the Hopetoun. I was amused while I took a piss, anyway.
Mark Greenaway
Mental note to self: When you first start cooking with chillies, be careful how much you add!May 08, 2008
Simon Rumble
They do things differently in Tassie
The government of Tasmania (that'd be the Lennon government, not Gunns in case you're confused) do things differently in Tasmania. They paid for a big DC power link from the island to the mainland, which was switched on just in the nick of time as Tasmania ran out of water to run its hydro dams. Apparently the link, built to export electricity to the mainland, has flowed almost exclusively in the other direction since it was built.
Anyway, when you're running cables it's very easy to stick a few fibres in the cable run, and that's what they did. Basslink includes a fibre connection to the mainland, which would be a boon to telecommunications services in the state. Currently the only active fibre is owned by the corporate gorilla Telstra, and as monopolies tend to do, they charge like there's no tomorrow. ISP Internode, which recently stopped selling residential ADSL2+ and 8 megabit ADSL1 plans, claims Telstra charges 6 times more for the Hobart-Melbourne route than they pay to ship data between Melbourne and the US.
This would, of course, all be solved if the fibre attached to Basslink were switched on. It's been sitting there since 2003, unused. Now it emerged that the company that Tasmania contracted to operate the fibre gets paid $2 million a year regardless of whether it's operating or not. So the company would need to guarantee at least $2 million in profit a year to do better than the alternative of letting the fibre sit on the bottom of the sea, dark.
This is the thing about privatisation which always ends up burning governments. The commercial world they're trying to entice holds all the cards, and has many other investment opportunities open to them. They have expensive and clever merchant bankers and lawyers, just waiting to negotiate the vendor (the government, that is, us) up against the wall. We see it time and again when previously "commercial in confidence" contracts between the private sector and governments are leaked or opened up: governments sell the family silver, but continue to take all the risks.
When negotiating these deals, the private sector always seems to manage to put in risk-avoiding clauses that leave the public sector carrying the can if it doesn't work out. With little risk, the private sector ends up just as bloated and inefficient (often even worse) as the public sector they replaced.
So if you're looking at the private sector to be more efficient, under the types of contracts that get signed, they're not. It costs more for private companies to raise money in the bond markets, so it's more expensive. And then they need a profit margin added on top. All up meaning it costs more, while tying the hands of governments for decades to come.
If you're a Tasmanian, check out Digital Tasmania and lobby your MPs to get this sorted. It's really very simple to fix. Just turn on the fibre!
Mark Greenaway
Both my stats tutorials completely sucked today.Pascal Klein
On body modification
Body modification is a permanent or semi-permanent alteration of the body for non-medical reasons — think spiritual, societal, BDSM play, aesthetic or practical. Body modification has been in practice for at least two thousand plus years—Ötzi the Iceman was found with a fairly large earlobe piercing (1–000 gauge; 7–11mm) and 57 carbon tattoos.
Yesterday I had another piercing done — a vertical eyebrow piercing sitting right beside my first on my left eyebrow. I wanted to get another piercing before I leave for Germany this Sunday. Being my second eyebrow piercing I knew what I had coming and all in all it was a fairly relaxing procedure, as far as piercings go. My latest metallic addition had me reflect over the topic of body modifications again — the image I present to others both at work and in my personal interactions.
These issues came up twice before — when I got my first eyebrow piercing and later when I had my Ashley piercing (an inverted vertical centered labret). Eyebrow piercings are simple to get, quick and easy to heal and generally bruise or swell very little. My Ashley piercing on the other hand left my lip swollen for several weeks, bruised and discoloured. Now that the primary healing is over I’m as happy as a clam; I love it. I consulted my employer, work colleagues, family and close friends about both of the piercings and received mixed responses. Work was open to the idea and didn’t mind whatsoever, family didn’t mind either way and accepted it was my decision whilst most of my friends were supportive and receptive to the idea.
Ultimately it comes down to an alteration of the body that can affect the impressions we leave upon others, particularly first impressions. First impressions are vital to good relationships; as much as we like to think we don’t judge books by their covers our first impressions of someone will shape our reactions and future interactions with that person.
The way we look during social interactions is influenced by many factors. Two that come to mind first include the way we dress (is she wearing a casual t-shirt or smart business wear) and personal hygiene (how clean are his fingernails). Body modification also affects the way we look.
I’ve found little issue with the piercings I have and the way they’ve altered my personal image. The only notable observations are that interactions with those several generations older than myself tend to be more conservative and prone to look less favourably upon visible body modifications. This is obviously something that I needed to weigh up — how much did I want to get the piercings versus how often I would have important business meetings with government types. I don’t want to make accusations that public servants are all conservative, but I think the example works.
On that note working in Canberra means I’ll probably run across a public servant just by walking out the door here in the City. I have a few colleagues who directly work for the government and themselves have a piercing or three, if not a tattoo or something else and have had no issues getting or holding their job. I’m glad that thus far I’ve had no problems in business interactions and happy to rarely hear of prejudicial treatment relating to body modifications, at least here in Australia.
In closing, I’ve also been told that as a “creative type” we’re given a little more leeway in this entire regard and sometimes we’re almost expected to be somewhat more outgoing and expressive.
May 07, 2008
Mark Greenaway
What condition are the Saudi oil fields in? Oil prices have been high of late, but that doesn't mean we're peaking. Given how important the Saudi oil fields are to the world's oil production, someone independent should be allowed in to audit, but I really don't think that's going to happen.Simon Rumble
I have pubic lice in my mailbox
While it would be a nice euphemism, Bug Girl attempted to order pubic lice over the Internet. Unsuccessfully, I might add.
From the comments:
However heinous it is to make a living selling pubic vermin over the internet, it is somehow even more despicable to take people's money and then NOT send them pubic lice.
Michael Fox
Finally caved in
As of yesterday I finally caved in and purchased a Sony Playstation 3. Being a fan of GTA for a long time, it finally swayed me. Although the cruncher came when my wife discovered that the May issue of Australian Womens Weekly contained a Target discount coupon. After tracking down a store with stock, we told them I will be in by close of business to pickup and pay for it. Store in question was happy enough to hold a pack.
So as of lastnight, I now have a PS3 and GTA IV game. I really like the game, it’s quite good. The detail of the city is great. I have to say the cars in the game are very good too, as is the driving around the city and having accidents etc. I think I will have some fun going forward trying to complete it.
Target’s PS3 + GTAIV pack price was $729, so I ended up getting $70 off this price with the voucher. So final buy price at register was $659. And then when you minus the price of the game (or the lowest price I’ve seen the game for of $78), the console cost us $581.
Plan for the weekend is to grab a HDMI cable and hook it upto to our TV this way, so we get the best resolution possible (especially when it comes time to play Bluray movies). I also want to grab an optical audio cable so the audio can be sent directly to our Yamaha AMP for the best possible sound output.
May 06, 2008
Scott Sinclair
Iron Man
Tonight I had the pleasure of watching Iron Man. And it really was a pleasure.
It has been a while since I've seen such a well put together movie, which only had very minor flaws. I had seen the trailers for it a few times, and I was looking forward to the movie for some time, but it still managed to beat my expectations many times by the end of the film.
I really suggest getting down to your local cinema and watching it (even if cinemas can be overpriced!).
Check out the trailers for yourself at the official Iron Man website.
PS. The comedy in it helps to break things up - and the robots are just so funny .. especially the one who mans the fire extinguisher.
Robert Thomson
12 days until Maibaumkraxeln!
The countdown has begun! Maibaumkraxeln is an annual event in Freinberg, Austria (just near Passau) of beer-swilling pole-climbing fun! There are often side-events that are more readily accessible to the inebriated types, but ultimately it's just a day of drinking beer and eating good Austrian/Bavarian food in the sun along with friends and strangers, while watching some death-defying unharnessed people climb a 15m high pole like monkeys, and watching others climb it like your grandmother, inching up with arms and legs holding on tight enough to choke a bodybuilder. I can't recommend it enough! This year it's on the 18th of May (unless the weather really is terrible, in which case it's postponed). Bring your Lederhosen and your Dirndls and come along!
Lindsay Holmwood
Stolen TomTom
Yesterday while at Parramatta Westfield our car was broken into, and our TomTom was stolen.
If you’ve bought a TomTom ONE 3rd edition with the serial number
Y11427C00018
I want it back. Now.
May 05, 2008
Simon Rumble
"Imagine you've taken half a tab of LSD and are at a very bad performance art installation"
No, not Club Kooky but Marcus Westbury at the Logies. Hilarious description of a surreal event.
Red carpet arrival. A spotter peers in limo window to see who of any interest is in the limo. "No one!" they call back to red carpet show director crew.
Peter Hardy
GTA 4: censorship and conspiracy theorising
I bought Grand Theft Auto IV when it (finally) launched last week. It’s a huge sprawling masterpiece of a game, and I was planning on writing a review at some point. Just not right now.
Some very specific subsections of the intertubes have been very upset recently at the fact that Rockstar submitted a modified version of the game to the OFLC for classification. Australia (And, unfortunately, NZ. Sorry guys :-( ) wound up with a game that was self-censored in advance so that it would pass with an MA15+ rating. Rockstar have been very vague about exactly what changes have been made. And even a week after launch, nobody’s entirely sure about what was changed. Some suspect cutscenes were edited or dropped altogether (one specific rumour involves, um, intimate contact with a baseball bat), others suspected that old stalwart of the GTA series — interaction with hookers. I can confirm neither of these, because at 17% completion I’m yet to see either a prostitute or a bat. But the only people who can say for sure are still being very coy.
This was done because Australia has no R18+ classification for games. It’s fairly depressing that our Attorneys-General still refuse to introduce one. I just don’t understand why I’m allowed to see explicit content on a movie screen, but not on my console.
Anyway, I digress from what I wanted to write, which is another story that begins with “So I was playing GTA4…”. Everybody I speak to on a regular basis is quite sick of hearing this, which is a shame because I can promise it’s going to keep happening for a while yet.
So I was playing GTA4 (*groan*) tonight, and took my cousin Roman to a bar. This is a fairly simple minigame which involves, well, walking into a bar. Then you walk out later, too drunk to stand up. Watching characters stumbling, walking sideways and falling over is an effective and hilarious demonstration of the game’s new physics engine Euphoria. But Roman wanted to go home, so all I did was walk straight back out to my car and get in.
Drink driving was something else that people were worried would be omitted from the Australian release. But it remains, and compared to walking, driving under the influence in GTA is an absolutely horrific experience. Controlling the vehicle is impossible, you’re more likely to attract police attention (which means you have to drive faster), and the excessive motion blur and camera effects combine to make me feel physically ill. Seriously. If I weren’t already on the wagon, doing this once would make me consider it.
I got in the car, it started up, and the main character Niko says to himself “If you drink then drive, Niko, you’re a bloody idiot”. Then I drove off, squinting at the screen and trying not to bounce off inconvenient obstacles like buildings.
At this point, any Australian will instantly recognise the classic slogan from a fairly successful anti-drink driving campaign. I know I did, and a little bit of googling around reveals a whole bunch of other Australians who’ve pointed it out. Which is where I finally get to the point. This line, and a lot of the others delivered by people when Niko is driving them around drunk, seem very out of character, and just plain awkward compared to the rest of the dialogue.
This game has been getting a lot of great reviews, which I think are well deserved. A lot of them cite the excellent story, great character development, and outstanding dialogue. Again, I’d agree with all of that. But “bloody idiot”? Stone the flamin’ crows! Why not just drag Ray Meagher off the set of Home and Away to voice the lead character while you’re at it?
To make matters worse, while I was idly wondering about this and googling around, all I could find were Australians pointing out this line and how funny it was. Maybe it’s because they’re the only ones who would spot the reference, whether it was intentional or not. Or maybe because they’re the only ones who are seeing it. Yes, that’s right. I’m going to put my aluminium foil hat on, and start wondering out loud right now if the changes that were made weren’t scenes being cut or reshot, but dialogue added to appease the censors and lighten otherwise very questionable content?
Also, I’m going to be driving around drunk a lot more now trying to prove my point. In-game, naturally, because I’m not a bloody idiot.
James Purser
Media Watch - Priorities Much?
I've just finished watching tonights Media Watch, and I have to ask who is setting the priorities for the programme at the moment?
Tonights episode focused on an ABC run conference concentrating on Journalism and the Internet, with a pretty heavy focus on the perception that the move to online news is a threat to "serious" journalism. All well and good and to be honest I would have liked to have gone to the conference myself.
However, considering this was the first media watch since the West Australian Government had ordered a police raid on one of the major WA newspapers to chase down the source of what even the WA State Premier describes as an "innocuous" leak, I would have expected to see some time dedicated to that event. Instead what we got was a couple of seconds at the end of the programme and a throw away "perhaps we'll look at that next week".
Media Watch is one of the more important ways the Media can keep an eye on itself. It's only ten minutes a week, but it's enough to break real stories and open up the often closed world of Australian Media. To have it slip up and relegate an event like the one above to "maybe next week", concerns me as much as the 7:30 Report's blatantly dodgy report on ISP filtering did.
Come on Aunty, I expect better from you.
Simon Rumble
Firefox 3 looking good
I thought I'd try out Firefox 3 for a bit. Part of my job is to stay up to date with the latest and greatest, and I was hoping the much-touted memory management enhancements would be a nice plus.
So far, I'm well impressed. AJAX- and JavaScript-heavy sites are vastly faster, so for example Gmail snaps open, Google Reader zips along. The CMS I use all day every day also flies. Most importantly, they really do seem to have plugged the memory leaks. By this time of day, I'd expect Firefox to be around 200 megs, having used a few AJAX sites quite heavily. Instead, it's around 115 megs with four tabs and two CMS windows open. It also seems to go down when you close tabs and windows, which is something that didn't happen before. It also remains quite zippy.
Haven't noticed any bugs or rendering weirdness yet, which is a good sign. Only problem so far is that Firebug isn't yet available. There's a version of it for Firefox 3, but it apparently has some issues. If I decide Firefox 3 is stable enough to use all the time, I'll try out the upgraded Firebug. Life without Firebug would be a much reduced life...
Jeremy Visser
Jeremy
I have a Compaq Evo N610c, and yesterday I got Suspend to RAM working on Ubuntu 8.04!
It’s actually really easy, and just involves tweaking a configuration file.
Firstly, make sure you are not using uswsusp or suspend2 (TuxOnIce). If you’re unsure, run the following:
sudo apt-get remove uswsusp suspend2
All you have to do is open up /usr/lib/hal/scripts/linux/hal-system-power-suspend-linux in a text editor, and find this line:
QUIRKS=""
Change it to:
QUIRKS="--quirk-vbe-post --quirk-vbemode-restore --quirk-vbestate-restore"
Finally, save the file. Now, try suspending! Make sure you save all your work, because it still may crash. You can either use the Suspend command in the Quit menu in GNOME, or type “pm-suspend” in a terminal.
If you’re lucky, like me, your Evo should now Suspend to RAM and resume successfully!
Andrew Cowie
java-gnome 4.0.7 released!
This blog post is an extract of the release note from the NEWS file which you can read online … or in the
sources,
of course!
java-gnome 4.0.7 (30 Apr 2008)
Draw some.
In addition to the usual improvements to our coverage of the GNOME libraries, this release introduces preliminary coverage of the Cairo Graphics drawing library, along with the infrastructure to make it work within a GTK program.
Drawing with Cairo
The trusty Cairo context, traditionally declared as a variable named cr in
code, is mapped as class
Context. Various Cairo types
such as different surfaces and patterns are mapped as an abstract base class
(Surface, Pattern) along with various concrete subclasses (ImageSurface,
XlibSurface, and SolidPattern, RadialPattern, etc). Error checking is
implicit: the library status is checked internally after each operation and an
Exception thrown if there is a failure.
Thanks in particular to Carl Worth for having reviewed our API and having helped test our implementation.
New coverage and continuing improvement
The single option choice buttons in GTK are called RadioButtons and have now
been exposed. When using them you need to indicate the other buttons they are
sharing a mutually exclusive relationship with, and this is expressed by
adding them to a RadioButtonGroup.
The usual steady refinements to our coverage of the GtkTreeView API continue.
There’s a new DataColumn type for Stock icons, and TreeModelSort is now
implemented, along with minor changes to various other miscellaneous classes.
Considerable internal optimizations have been done, especially relating to
ensuring proper memory management, with notable refinements to make use of
“caller owns return” information available in the .defs data. This fixes a
number of bugs. Thanks to Vreixo Formoso for having driven these improvements.
Error handling has been improved for GLib based libraries as well. If an
ERROR or CRITICAL is emitted, our internals will trap this and throw an
exception instead, allowing the developer to see a Java stack trace leading
them to the point in their code where they caused the problem.
Internationalization support
java-gnome now has full support for the GNOME translation and localization
infrastructure, including the standard _("Hello") idiom for marking strings
for extraction and translation, but combined with some of the powerful support for positional parameters available from Java’s MessageFormat as well. There’s a fairly detailed explanation in the
Internationalization
utility class.
Build changes
Note that as was advertised as forthcoming some time ago, Java 1.5 is now the minimum language level required of your tool chain and Java virtual machine in order to build and use the java-gnome library.
Thanks to Colin Walters, Manu Mahajan, Thomas Girard, Rob Taylor, and Serkan Kaba for contributing improvements allowing the library to build in more environments and for their work on packages for their distributions.
The download page has updated instructions for getting either binary packages or checking out the source code.
Documentation, examples, and testing
Refinements to the API documentation continue across the board, notably improving consistency. A large number of javadoc warnings have also been cleaned up.
While not a full blown tutorial, the number of fully explained examples is
growing. There are examples for box packing and signal connection, presenting
tabular data, and basic drawing, among others. See the description page in the
doc/examples/ section.
This code, together with the not inconsiderable number of unit tests and the
code for generating snapshots of Widgets and Windows means that a large
portion of the public API is tested within the library itself. The number of
non-trivial applications making use of java-gnome is starting to grow, which
are likewise providing for ongoing validation of the codebase.
Summary
You can see the full changes accompanying a release by grabbing a copy of the sources and running:
$ bzr diff -r tag:v4.0.6..tag:v4.0.7
Looking ahead
It’s probably unwise to predict what will be in future releases. The challenge for anyone contributing is that they need to understand what something does, when to use it (and more to the point, when not to!), and be able to explain it to others. This needs neither prior experience developing with GNOME or guru level Java knowledge, but a certain willingness to dig into details is necessary.
That said, I imagine we’ll likely see further Cairo improvements as people start to use it in anger. It shouldn’t take too long until the bulk of the functionality needed for most uses is present in java-gnome. In particular, forthcoming coverage of the Pango text drawing library will round things out nicely.
There are a number of other major feature improvements we’d like to see in java-gnome. Conceptual and design work is ongoing on for bindings of GConf, GStreamer, and even support for applets. Within GTK, there have been a number of requests made for various things to be exposed, for example, the powerful GtkTextView / GtkTextBuffer text display and editing capability. Some of these have preliminary implementations; whether or not any given piece of work is acceptable in time for any particular future release will remain to be seen and depends on the willingness of clients to fund us to review and test such work.
In the mean time, people are happily using the library to develop rich user
interfaces, which is, of course, the whole point. We’re always pleased to
welcome new faces to the community around the project. If you want to learn
more, stop by #java-gnome and say hello!
You can download java-gnome from ftp.gnome.org or easily checkout a branch from ‘mainline’ using Bazaar:
$ bzr clone bzr://research.operationaldynamics.com/bzr/java-gnome/mainline java-gnome
AfC
Roger Barnes
Things 'n' stuff
Long time no post. I'm alive, reasonably well, slowly adjusting to new life, and keeping myself busy. Anyway, enough chit-chat...The Australian Ultimate (Frisbee) Championships were on recently, this time in Coffs Harbour. Over the weekend, I finally sorted through all the photos from the event, where I was official photographer again. The results can be seen here. There are over 3000 photos, about half of what I actually shot (sports photography is like that). There are shots online that wouldn't normally make the cut, but to improve the chances of all players appearing in a photo, I was less aggressive in culling (which means more boring pics for everyone else).
Since I'm outsourcing printing this year, my workflow has been simplified and is purely Linux-based this time (with the help of Bibble, the only non-FOSS software involved), it works a treat. During the event I had my new laptop (yeah, I caved and got a Dell, Vista lasted about an hour on it) and a 22" LCD showing pics in a dual screen setup with GQView for active browsing and the GLSlideshow screensaver for idle slideshows. My only gripe with it was with the network manager in Ubuntu 7.10, too much mucking around just to get a new wired DHCP connection up, and wifi discovery was hopeless. I'll make a considered move to 8.04 soon (I fear graphics drivers will bite me if I rush it).
Now that the frisbee thing is done (apart from order processing), I'm hoping that my headspace will return to a more functional one that I've not had in a looong while, where I don't forget important stuff due to the minutiae battling for attention. Next on the list for me is to produce submissions for an art show that starts in less than 2 weeks. Anyone up for a day trip to Springwood on the 24th? More on this later.
Dave Airlie
compiz on rs480/rs690 working!!
So if you have a DRI enabled ATI rs4xx/rs6xx integrated chipset and have been cursing my name because compiz doesn't work without foobar'ed textures, you can stop the cursing and start the praisin...I've found the bug in the r300 swtcl path that caused this, the 3D driver uses the fragment shader to do rectangular textures, and this involves feeding the texture dimensions into the fragment shaders in constants. However the code to update those constants for new textures wasn't always getting called at the correct time in the swtcl path.
So http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/diff/?id=a7016949f27f7612ffba7a4d0c5e6280cb3e66ba
is the fix and is now in mesa master, I'll pull it into mesa 7.0.x branch and I'll probably release F8 and F9 mesa packages with fixes. This probably won't make F9 GA but the 0-day mesa update will contain the fix.
This bug has been annoying me since July 2007 so woot!!
May 04, 2008
Andre Pang
The Year in Movies, 2007
It seems that my exercise to keep track of every single movie I watched last year actually worked. Here’s how 2007 turned out for me:
- 5th of January: Blood Diamond (Hoyts Broadway, 8/10)
- 1st of February: Perfume (Hoyts Cinema Paris, 7/10)
- 4th of February: The Fountain (Hoyts George St City, 8/10)
- 10th of February: Fight Club (DVD, repeat viewing, 8/10)
- 11th of February: Pan’s Labyrinth (Hoyts George St City, 7/10)
- 10th of March: Quand j’étais chanteur, a.k.a The Singer (Palace Academy Paddington, 6.5/10)
- 18th of March: Hors de Prix, a.k.a. Priceless (Palace Academy Leichardt, 7/10)
- 24th of March: The Illusionist (Greater Union Tuggerah, 7/10)
- 3rd of April: Hot Fuzz (Hoyts Fox Studios, 8.5/10).
- 10th of April: 300 (Hoyts Westfield Chatswood, 7.5/10).
- 7th of May: La Science des rêves, a.k.a. The Science of Sleep (Hayden Orpheum, 7/10).
- 12th of May: Spider-man 3 (Hoyts Westfield Chatswood, 7.5/10)
- 22nd of May: Shooter (Greater Union Macquarie, 7/10).
- 27th of May: Tales from Earthsea (Dendy Newtown, 6.5/10).
- 30th of May: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (Hayden Orpheum, 7/10).
- 27th of June: Knocked Up (AMC Pacific Theatres, The Grove, Los Angeles, 8/10).
- 29th of June: Blades of Glory (Air New Zealand LAX to SYD, 8/10).
- 1st of July: Transformers (Hoyts Broadway, 8/10)
- 8th of July: Ocean’s Thirteen (Greater Union Bondi Junction, 7/10).
- 17th of July: Harry Potter and the Order Of the Phoenix (special groovy RSP screening at Hoyts, Fox Studios, 7/10).
- 2nd of August: Notes on a Scandal (DVD, 7/10).
- 5th of August: Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain, Le, a.k.a. Amélie (DVD, 8.5/10)
- 7th of August: The Simpsons Movie (Hoyts Fox Studios, 7.5/10).
- 17th of August: Die Hard 4.0 (Hoyts Broadway, 7.5/10).
- 14th of September: The Bourne Ultimatum (Greater Union Bondi Junction, 6.5/10)
- 22nd of September: Ratatouille (Hoyts Broadway, 8.5/10)
- 23rd of September: An Inconvenient Truth (DVD, 8.5/10).
- 30th of September: The Holiday (DVD, 7/10)
- 5th of October: Shaun of the Dead (DVD, 7.5/10).
- 6th of October: Rush Hour 3 (Hoyts Chatswood Westfield, 6.5/10).
- 13th of October: Resident Evil: Extinction (Shaw Cinemas, Isetan Singapore, 6.5/10).
- 4th of November: A Chinese Odyssey (DVD, 6.5/10).
- 18th of November: Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Reading Cinemas at Rhodes, 7/10).
- 2nd of December: Stranger Than Fiction (DVD, 8/10).
- 9th of December: Ghost in the Shell S.A.C.: Solid State Society (DVD, 9/10)
- 16th of December: The Prestige (DVD, 8.5/10).
- 24th of December: National Treasure: Book of Secrets (Hoyts Chatswood Westfield, 7.5/10)
- 28th of December: Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (Hoyts Chatswood Mandarin, 7.5/10)
All in all, a pretty good movie year, with Solid State Society topping the list, and The Prestige, Stranger than Fiction, An Inconvenient Truth, Ratatouille, Amélie, Transformers, Blades of Glory, Knocked Up, Hot Fuzz, The Fountain, and Blood Diamond as my personal A-graders. Reflecting back, about the only two ratings I disagree with are Pan’s Labyrinth (should’ve been way higher, probably 8 or 8.5) and An Inconvenient Truth (which I don’t think quite deserved an 8.5).
I await the arrival of Wall•E this year. The trailer looks like, well, it was done by Pixar. Great humour, fantastic graphics (thank you 1080p), kid-friendly, and with the director and writer of Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc, and Toy Story 2. I’m actually beginning to believe that Pixar have actually built a self-reinforcing system of awesome that is going to be impossible to knock down for at least the next fifty years. It’s pretty incredible that most of their blockbuster movies have been directed and produced by completely different people.
To all my friends working at Pixar, I love you. Please continue doing what you do best.
iPhone: Currency Converter
A small tip for l’iPhone digerati (aw haw haw haw!): if you, like me, like to look up currency rates, forget about all this Web browser and Web application malarkey. Use the Stocks application instead:
- go to the Stocks application,
- add a new stock,
- use a stock name of
AUDUSD=Xfor the Australian to US dollar,USDGBP=Xfor USD to the British Pound, etc. (Use the Yahoo! finance page if you don’t know the three-letter currency codes.)
Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here you go:
Pretty!
Matthew Palmer
Spam Filter Developers and Administrators: Dumber Than The Dumbest Person On The Internet
For the past couple of days, one of my e-mail addresses has been some spammer's choice for forged From: lines in their spew. So, as invalid addresses aren't high on a spammer's list of priorities, I get all the bounces. The fact that MTAs, in this day and age, don't have SMTP session recipient validation is unpleasant. However, with ISPs requiring all outgoing e-mail to go through their own servers, I can kinda see where that can break down. I still don't like it, but I'll live with it.
In amongst all the bounces, though, there's a lot of other, really obnoxious, crap. So far, I've had five "please click this link / reply to this e-mail so it'll go through" (AKA "please filter my spam for me")[1]. I've also had a large number of e-mails saying that my e-mail was blocked or unwanted or whatever, from spam filtering programs themselves.
What I haven't got any of, as far as I can determine, is any e-mail from enraged recipients saying "stop sending me this crap!" or anything of that nature.
The only conclusion I can reasonably draw from this data is that users know that source addresses are forged and there's no point replying to them, but the people whose job it is to write, maintain, and run spam software don't. That's downright embarrassing. Not a single user was dumb enough to assume that I really sent the e-mail, but IT "professionals" who deal with spam for a living are.
If you are in any way involved in the production, sale, or use of an anti-spam product that hasn't realised that the from addresses of spams are universally forged, please shoot yourself in the head. Really. I'm sick to death of people who should know better doing the most stunningly stupid things regardless.
If you don't know that your software is spamming the rest of the world, then you're still on the hook. What other dumb shit is your system doing that you know nothing about? On the other hand, if you do know that your spam filter is contributing to the noise, you're even worse -- no spam has a real source address. If your software or system spews crap because some clueless manager told you to do it, then you need to grow some courage and ponder on the words of Napoleon:
A commander-in-chief cannot take as an excuse for his mistakes in warfare an order given by his sovereign or his minister, when the person giving the order is absent from the field of operations and is imperfectly aware or wholly unaware of the latest state of affairs. It follows that any commander-in-chief who undertakes to carry out a plan which he considers defective is at fault; he must put forward his reasons, insist on the plan being changed, and finally tender his resignation rather than be the instrument of his army's downfall.
In other words, if you did it and you know you shouldn't have, it's still your fault, regardless of why you did it. Take some responsibility for your actions, for fucks sake.
[1. Every single one of which I was more than happy to confirm -- if you want other people to do a job for you, you have to deal with the fact that some of them might not do it in quite the way you expect. I encourage anyone else who thinks that an anti-spam system that requires the rest of the world to filter your inbox is stupid (even disregarding the likely problems of infinite loops if everyone had a challenge-response inbox) to do the same.
Mark Greenaway
I had my first rehearsal with the science revue band on Saturday. All the things I worried about (not having professional quality gear, not knowing the material intimately and not being a very good jazz player yet) didn't seem to matter. What mattered was being able to make it through twelve tunes we barely knew in an hour. And I could.I played a terrible solo, but I'll chalk that up to experience. It was still lots of fun, and now I have a lot of incentive to learn some things I've been meaning to learn and practice. We're playing a gig in three weeks, for some postgrads at USyd. How hard can it be?
May 03, 2008
Sridhar Dhanapalan
‘Open Source software is the software establishment!’
It can be amusing when news articles or blogs are written about a report/study that has only been released or read in excerpt. Small snippets can be extremely controversial on their own, and are easily taken out of the context of the gestalt article.
Such has been the case with the announcement of the Standish Group’s report, titled ‘Trends in Open Source’. The report is available in full to Standish subscribers, or for a fee of $US 1,000 per copy. Standish themselves chose to drum-up publicity in a press release two and a half weeks ago:
Open Source software is raising havoc throughout the software market. It is the ultimate in disruptive technology, and while to it is only 6% of estimated trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real loss of $60 billion in annual revenues to software companies.
Some commentators pounced on this in defence of FOSS, and in doing so played right into Standish’s hands. A week later, other reports chose to focus on the technical perceptions of FOSS solutions, in particular security. Some of these articles basically said, “we haven’t been able to read the full report, but this is what we’ve been told”.
More informed accounts have hit the virtual presses in recent days, and it’s been revealed that the report is very positive overall with regards to FOSS. When iTnews asked me for comment, I was assured that the report had been thoroughly read. I said a lot of things, but the quotation that made the final cut is the following:
FOSS is inherently compatible with a free market, and hence with business. There is no closed-off ‘command economy’ that is characterised by proprietary software companies. The software and its development are totally open to the world.
Following the interview, I tried to distil some key points about FOSS:
- The keys are transparency and accountability, as well as freedom over your own information and independence from vendor lock-in.
- Most FOSS is based on open standards, which means that users/companies are not tying their data/processes to one vendor or piece of software. Some might be wary of FOSS, but I don’t think anyone can argue against the merits of open standards.
- There is plenty of FOSS that works well on proprietary platforms (like Windows). There is no inherent tie-in with Linux.
- FOSS has been most successful where it isn’t noticed. This can be in embedded devices, or in popular desktop applications like Firefox and OpenOffice.org.
- Most people might think of a ‘computer’ as a desktop computer, but most of ICT (and ICT growth) is actually elsewhere (servers, consumer electronics, mobile phones, telecoms, embedded, supercomputers, etc.). Linux and FOSS is far more popular in these fields.
- Most of the Internet is based on FOSS and open standards built around FOSS. For instance, TCP/IP networking was built for BSD UNIX (which is open source), and the majority of Web servers run the open source Apache web server.
Obviously there are more points than these, but I deliberately kept this as a quick ‘off the top of my head’ exercise as a means of preventing it from growing into an encyclopaedic tome.
LotD: Ubuntu theme for Windows
©2008 Sridhar Dhanapalan.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia Licence.
May 02, 2008
Simon Rumble
Inbox zero: the radical approach
There's been a bit of discussion recently about Inbox Zero, getting your email inbox empty. Well I just discovered a rather radical approach to getting there. I accidentally deleted everything in the inbox. Thought I was in another folder and deleted all.
I've got backups, so if I find there's anything vital I'll be able to recover, but for now it's strangely liberating. Will see how I go.
Jeremy Visser
Ubuntu on the OLPC XO-1
Last night, I put Ubuntu 8.04 (running the GNOME desktop) on an SD card of mine (thus disabling my camera for the time being) and booted it on the OLPC XO-1:
I avoided doing this for a while, as I know it kind of defeats the purpose of having an XO, but it’s been educational doing it, and I’m impressed with the results.
First thing I noticed was the speed. It’s much faster than I thought it would be, and about the same speed as Ubuntu would be on a 300MHz or 400MHz Pentium II desktop.
The webcam is detected as /dev/video0 and shows as a Video4Linux 2 device to GStreamer; however, it bombs out with some error that I can’t make head or tails of. Also, neither Cheese nor VLC will display the webcam.
Initially, I thought the audio was broken, but I found it was because the user I had created hadn’t been added to the audio group. Editing /etc/group and doing a logout-login cycle fixed that.
The touchpad was very finicky — much more so than in Sugar. Most annoying was that “tapping” had been enabled, where tapping on the touchpad would result in a mouse click. Well, it didn’t even need to be a “tap” — even lifting your finger off the touchpad lightly would sometimes result in a mouse click or two.
Fortunately, by adding the line “option mousedev tap_time=0” to /etc/modprobe.d/olpc.conf.dist, the tapping was disabled. Much better.
Been doing some video playback and audio playback — video is not too bad, but the audio is crackly. Probably PulseAudio’s fault. Need to work on that.
Next step: trying out Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded Edition (a.k.a. hildon-desktop).
James Purser
We Are Back
Just a quick note to let everyone know that after a week and a bit, we are back online.
May 01, 2008
Matthew Palmer
Architecture Astronauts
I really don't think I have anything to add to Joel Spolsky's latest essay, on the horror of architecture astronauts. My favourite quote:
It sort of bothers me, intellectually, that there are these people running around acting like they're building the next great thing who keep serving us the same exact TV dinner that I didn't want on Sunday night, and I didn't want it when you tried to serve it again Monday night, and you crunched it up and mixed in some cheese and I didn't eat that Tuesday night, and here it is Wednesday and you've rebuilt the whole goddamn TV dinner industry from the ground up and you're giving me 1955 salisbury steak that I just DON'T WANT. What is it going to take for you to get the message that customers don't want the things that architecture astronauts just love to build.
Michael Knight
Random words on command
Today I needed to generate SQL queries to populate a database table with some test data. I was making a Facebook-style search & narrow thing where, as you type, the list of options narrow based on your search string. I wanted to test the efficiency of my implementation, so I figured it would make testing easier if I used real words for the list items.It seems a lot of people have needed to do this, so it wasn't long before I found a fairly good solution for my purposes. Here's the magic line:
perl -nle '$word = $_ if rand($.) 1; END { print $word }' /usr/share/dict/wordsI really have no idea why this works as I'm no Perl Monger. I also found that I didn't have any words at
/usr/share/dict/words, since I was on an Ubuntu server install. I needed to sudo aptitude install wbritish. Incidentally, it worked on my OS X 10.5 machine too. Unix is handy.I only needed 500 records and calling this 500 times didn't take too long. Much more and you'd probably have to modify your approach though.
Mark Greenaway
As it turns out, the stats quiz wasn't so bad. While I grumble about calculations occasionally, I really don't mind that much if I learn something from it. Made a few silly mistakes, didn't know some things, but that's perfectly normal in a quiz.Jeremy Visser
Jeremy
Some changes will be taking place around here. Most notably, this blog is now powered by WordPress.com. This means I cannot use the K2 theme I was previously using (as WordPress.com only has some buggy horrible K2-lite thing, not the real K2), so I’ve now switched to Sandbox, and applied one of the styles I wrote a year or so ago. Doesn’t look too shabby, but it could be better. I should write a new, better-looking style soon.
Lindsay Holmwood
Datamapper + Log4r
If you’re using DataMapper and Log4r, make sure you specifically prepend the Log4r module to your class method calls. ie:
@logger = Log4r::Logger.new 'mylogger'
DataMapper provides its own Logger class that clutters the namespace and causes your programs to error out confusingly when calling @logger.add:
require 'log4r'
require 'datamapper'
@logger = Logger.new 'mylogger'
@logger.add(Log4r::StdoutOutputter.new('terminal'))
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/logger.rb:314:in `add': undefined method `<' for #<Log4r::StdoutOutputter:0xb7823220> (NoMethodError)
April 30, 2008
Mark Greenaway
If my lecturers would just stop giving me assignments long enough for me to ponder what we've learnt ...Stats is particularly brutal in third year. Between my two stats subjects I have eight assignments and a quiz this semester.
Simon Rumble
Where can I get Hogarth prints?
I've always loved Hogarth's Gin Lane and Beer Street engravings. The post-industrialized world's first moral panic was due to the flood of cheap spirits, coupled with a bored and concentrated population. "Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence" was the slogan of the gin palaces. Hogarth contrasted the debauched Gin Lane with the prosperous and healthy Beer Street, where the pawnbroker is out of business, the populace engaged in edifying pursuits. Kinda like the current vogue for talking about "binge drinking".
I've always wanted to buy some prints of these classic campaigning engravings. Periodically I look online and I invariably find "Gin Lane" but rarely "Beer Street" in the same format from the same vendor. Anyone got any suggestions to get this?
Alternative would be to print these public domain versions taken from Wikimedia Commons. Not sure the resolution is good enough though. I used to live around the corner from Hogarth's House and never made it there. I bet they would sell prints!
Pascal Klein
The first Open Source Industry & Community Report
This will most likely be old news for most — Waugh Partners released the first Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report following the census they conducted over the last year. This is it:
Industry, page 8 of the report.
Now with KLEPAS.ORG resurrected I wanted to briefly touch on it and entice those who haven’t yet seen it to download a copy. The report is licensed under a Creative Commons license and thus can be redistributed freely. A print copy is on its way — again see the census page above for more information.
Emloyment status pie chart.
I worked with Waugh Partners on the report producing their bar and pie graphs over the last few months. The work was done entirely using open source tools — namely Inkscape and Scribus. Working with Waugh Partners was a sincere pleasure: I was actively encouraged to use open source tools and of course got to have a sneak peak at the report. Thanks Jeff & Pia.
Andrew Cowie
No crisis for me
I was chatting with Atul earlier today when he expressed his dismay that Slashdot was off the air and asked me if I could get there? No. Meanwhile, I realized I couldn’t get to SourceForge. This was proving problematic as I had just done a release of an Open Source project I’m the maintainer of, and was trying to update the project website. Guess announcing the release will have to wait a bit :(.
Oh well. “The internet must be broken somewhere”.
We then recalled that these are both services of OSDN. I recall a few years back talking with the system administrators there about crisis management in IT environments and using procedures to manage change. They said they didn’t need any help with their operations. “We’re all set”. Uh huh. People always say that when things aren’t going wrong.
—
Of course, it is now 3am in California. It actually doesn’t matter where your servers are — it’s always 3am when things like this go wrong. Personally, I take it as conclusive proof about the underlying nature of the universe that this sort of thing only happens when it is the middle of the night. You can’t possibly find a less pleasant time to force sysadmins to get out of bed and to go try and fix things. Frankly, I think that’s just Someone trying to tell sysadmins that they made a poor career choice, but you know, He (or She, or It, or They, take your pick) needs to have a good laugh too.
AfC
Mary Gardiner
Safe diving practices
Background: I had mild to moderate shoulder pain after SCUBA diving a month
ago. I was treated for Decompression Sickness (DCS, the bends
) although
it's impossible to confirm the diagnosis for moderate pain, because it feels
exactly like a sprain or strain.
I just had my followup appointment about safe diving practices (there's an Australian standard, in fact). Since these are enormously different to diving practices pretty much anywhere, I thought they'd be of interest. These are the ones they wish they could give to everyone, by the way, not the ones that are only for people who have had DCS. Take the ones that are actually taught in training — slow ascents, safety stops — plus:
- dive the DCIEM tables with a square profile assumption (no multi-level, no computer algorithms);
- never do more than 2 dives in a day;
- never dive more than 4 days in a row; and
- the fact that everyone do repeated dives on the President Coolidge and in the Truk Lagoon to 50 or 60 metres breathing air and without decompression stops doesn't mean that everyone isn't an idiot.
OK, that last one comes up in dive training too I admit. But only in the context of your instructor sheepishly admitting to their idiotic profiles. (The relevance of breathing air at 60 metres is that's a lot of nitrogen, over 5 atmospheres of partial pressure, and nitrogen not only gives you DCS, it makes you rather drunk starting from about 25 metres and steadily getting worse from there.)
In my case there is one extra restriction: take a 3 metre depth penalty and a 3 minute time penalty reading the table. Which is pretty conservative. For reference, I could dive to 27 metres for a grand total of 11 minutes bottom time on that reading of the table. (30 metres for 14 minutes is the standard reading.) Unless I decompress of course, but that has its own risks (equipment failures mean I'm stuck with failed equipment AND a missed compulsory decompression stop). The reason for the penalty is that the scar tissue from the DCS injury to my shoulder (actually, we suspect two, plus the damage from subluxating it six times previously) renders me somewhat more vulnerable again.
For non-divers, to contrast this with diving as it is actually done by pretty much everyone ever, imagine that you are going to a dance party, but need to tell the organisers that for medical reasons you'd really appreciate it if they'd keep the music no louder than 40dB. Cheers, thanks.
Or, to make this about diving, imagine that you are on a dive boat travelling to some great dive site several hours from shore. Your air consumption isn't amazing, you can't keep up with the suntanned French couple or the hoary old guys who are coming back after 60 minutes with half a tank left and cursing their computer time limits. But the guy running the boat who has done 1500 dives and your group's friendly English backpacker dive guide have come up with a plan for your group that gives you 35 minutes of good solid diving to see all kinds of cool things. Now imagine I'm in your dive group. I'm the one whose medical advice is to do a 18 minute dive at the absolute maximum (the clock stops at the beginning of the ascent by the way, so probably about 24 minutes in the water total). The upside of this last scenario, I suppose, is that firstly my air consumption is rather good, so I can always loan the group my tank, and also that because I'm doing 2 dives a day and most liveaboards allow 4 at the very least, it won't happen every dive because I'll be on the boat sulking for most of them.
Or, let's face it, never doing liveaboard trips again.
For divers the obvious question is what about nitrox?
(For non-divers
still reading, nitrox or enriched air is a tank with less nitrogen and more
oxygen than the standard atmospheric ratio.) Well, it doesn't thrill the dive
doctors. They agree that it is much safer on air tables. They don't so
much like the use of separate tables to extend your dive time which, let's face
it, is why I'd want to use nitrox. It also comes with separate risks: the mix
can vary wildly from what they claim it is, and you have one more factor to
manage, which is oxygen toxicity. (High partial pressures of oxygen are toxic
to cells. The first you know of the cell damage is a sudden seizure. So the
solution is not to breathe those partial pressures, from about 1.4–1.6
atmospheres up. You shouldn't go much past 20 metres on 36% oxygen.)
There's nothing to stop me learning technical diving (adding helium to the mix to offset the risks of high pressures of nitrogen and oxygen) or adding decompression stops to my time, except that no dive boat I've ever been on is set up for the latter. (And they're both complex.) The Pacific is choppy: you can't really stay at 5.5 metres easily for 5 minutes without a good reference line. And the boats move all the time without warning, taking their good reference line with them.
