Recently I have added some Magnetic Bubbles of Distraction to my blog, for those who don’t like to read stuff. (Which appears to be most of the people I talk to, I am not sure why)

These used to be on by default, but now they are no longer. They are implemented in canvas and Javascript (and based on the work done by hakim ).

They are seperate to the drag and drop components of the blog theme, which allow people to move sections of the blog around the page at there lesiure, they are also seperate to the click to read links on each of the posts.

In Opera the pointer-events CSS isn’t implemented which means the canvas steals all the mouse clicks. For this reason control of the magnetic bubbles of distraction is done with keys on your keyboard.

Press b to start the bubbles,  press c twice quickly to create new bubble, place your mouse near the blue core of the bubble you want select and press d to start dragging it with your mouse and press d again to stop dragging it.

Pressing s with the same conditions as pressing d, will select the bubble and it will sprodically jump around your mouse, until it is deselected using s. Press x to hide the bubbles and press x appear to make them reappear. To turn bubbles off just press F5.

Best wishes and have fun,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Still no spice collection, just a single canister of Mixed Herbs, and still no bookshelf, justs books in boxes, although I have a small LCD TV, but need aVGA cable in order to use it with the netbook or other computers.

I did acquire icecream and apricot nectar and organic blueberries. . Though I am all out of icecream at present, so I will need to acquire some more, and also ration my consumption.

Trying to slowly focus on side projects in order to ensure they get completed slowly rather than misplaced in the chaotic and busy jumblings of life and employment.

Glad to be reading non-fiction books again , even if they are just digital and related to transaction processing or software development. I should probably resume speed reading, but I find myself enjoying the content too much in order to accelerate the pace.

Abstraction and complexity make for strange bedfellows or at least strange conceptual dreams with polymorphic spooning and heterogenous design patterns fracturing mental resonance in the early hours of the morning.

Yumcha is deliciious,  Omegle is just more of the same, I am tempted to train a chat bot or two there but the bias from various sources doesn’t make for a robust linguistical corpus.

Have fun everyone,

Best wishes,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

I am really enjoying the cold weather. I would have posted earlier but I spent two hours last night coining Chionarchimaniation (the act of entering a hyperactive / frenzied state during the winter or when exposed to cold weather or snow) , to express a concept in I had in mind for this post.

I still haven’t found a place to move out to, or a replacement netbook / laptop. I did buy a DWA-125 wireless dongle (for the Windows XP box on my floor so I can vpn into work) from Officeworks and was presently surprised to find that it uses rt2870 Linux drivers.

I love the cold weather, the contrast from the heat of shower water to cold air just makes me feel energised. Enjoying using Kmymoney to keep ledger of my accounts.  Much easier processing receipts as I  acquire them, rather than filing them and trying to decipher them once the warranty has ended and the ink is faded into invisibility.

No liking the lack of interaction on the bus, but I guess people just want to have their headphones on playing the sountrack to their existence in 128 KBs mp3 format, whilst they pretend that others around them don’t exist. Unfortunately they don’t seem to have the solipsisr attitude or belief system to go with it , just the behaviour.

Stuff I have been upto includes, assisting people with introduction to web application development, introduction to SEO, attempting to decomiple an application written in VB6. (I didn’t manage to with rec or boomerang, and as the person who asked found what they were looking for in a text file, they no longer needed the hashing algorithm reversed.)

Also watched Watchmen Motion comic and enjoyed it thoroughly. Interesting possibilities and justification for characterisation and setting. I hope to redevelop the drag and drop javascript distraction I previously made for this blog, preferably in jquery, but that will only happen if I find the time for it.

Most of my time has been spent at work, where I am familirising and further developing my knowledge in PL/SQL and Oracle, Telerik RadGrid and Telerik AJAX, using and abusing popups and iframes for fun and purpose, getting irked at ungraceful socket and signal behaviour (see http://www.madore.org/~david/computers/connect-intr.html for more information), Solaris diagnostics, LINQ magic, Vim and KSH, XMing and X forwarding over SSH and VPN connections using NetscreenRemote, NCP Juniper Secure Client and Shrew.

With regards to Gentoo GNU/Linux stuff on my netbook, sane_backends doesn’t compile due to change location of v4l libs, kernel-2.6.39 has udevd timeout issues with loading video card drivers using modprobe (hopefully fixed when gentoo-sources 2.6.40 or 3.0 come out), and not too much else.

Developed the chorus of a song this morning, should put it up on the lyrics page soon. Apologies to all the non tech people that don’t get the tech terms used above, it is ok, I am still alive and still doing stuff with things for purposes.

Have a nice week, month, < arbitrarily long amount of time here>

Best wishes,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

AC adapter on for net book is damaged, managed to get it working for the moment, replacement should arrive next week. When it does I will probably order some tools so I can repair the old one using cable splicing.

Messed Ubuntu configuration on MID by updating a single package, then accidently reinstall older firmware including old Android, old GNU Linux and old bootloader, nothing starts up clean, and I will have to borrow or acquire a male to male USB cable to reupdate the bootloader.

Work is fun, lots of Telerik familarisation, and lots of tickets to keep me busy.Managed to spend the test card from work on USB sticks at officeworks, which will probably be used at work, if colleagues don’t borrow them first.

Jellybean consumption is at an all time record high, considering they arrived Tuesday and were gone by Thursday. Met Scott on the bus again, had interesting conversation largely about subjective trust in humanity, and we were up to the influence of whimisicality and the nature of human indecision.

He also mentioned a cooperative house environment started by bunch of Griffith students, which once again made me thing about cooperative living environments as a whole, and how to ensure their long term sustainability in general.

The cool weather is nice. I really enjoy it, in spite of the weird looks as I appear to be missing a pullover or jacket.

Have fun and best wishes with whatever you are upto,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Updates: I am slowly doing stuff with dvswitch, some of which will involve the new webcam I received (logitech hd c510, works with uvcvideo, though not with built in webcam in tandem yet). The dvswitch stuff is a side effect of my volunteering for linux.conf.au 2011, which was amazing.

Other side effects include the development of my OpenWRT knowledge (I did lots of flashing of them for LCA) and getting to have fun in patch closets as well learning the basics about recording digital video. Additionally I am helping review the videos as well.

Also got a yubikey or two from LCA haven’t done much with them yet. My headphones broke (the pin of the off aux broke in to the laptop slot) in the middle of Vint Cerf’s keynote, but after some partially disassembly the other night, my headphones audio is working again.

Also volunteered at Lifeline Bookfest, for more long days and even less sleep. Not as many fun conversations or balloon creations this time, but still plenty of book counting, pricing and sorting. Got reminded that my fan fiction forays needed further embellishment and development. Managed to restrain myself to about 8 new books for the entire Bookfest, self restraint++. Bookfest also involved get trolleys of books down stairs as elevators faltered from flood fiasco.

Need to continue the gradually redesign effort of this blog. Other news includes my trip to NSW for Cheater’s wedding, was a fun trip and awesome wedding. (pacman wedding cake and harp and flute wedding music kind of do that).

Daylight savings time is interesting, I didn’t feel tired or jet lagged. Learnt how to play darts properly in NSW, not that I couldn’t play darts before, just that it wasn’t up to another YHA patron’s standard.

If I spent to too long talking about malicious overflows and memory leaks in HIPHOP as a potential FB attack vector to  a teenage cousin of the groom, my apologies, I just couldn’t handle the whole b@t f1l3z in n0t3p@d l33t h@xx0r thing.

NSW double decker trains are more interesting than QLD trains, but have far fewer friendly fellow passengers.

Other news is I started work, so I know have a day job which I am currently enjoying immensely. So much to do and get done both at home and at work. But if you want to catch up with me , most of you know where to find me.

I hope everyone is enjoying their Year of the Rabbit as much  as I am. We had 火鍋 which was wonderful in its peppercorn and chilli goodness.   What new foods have you trying or experienced a new recently ?

Best wishes,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Lots of stuff going on, bits and pieces of various things flying all over the place, although I am lacking the bickering domestic animals made from cloth swatches.

I have been having fun developing various projects in Python, JavaScript, C#, PHP and C++. I seem to update only once a month or there abouts, I probably should remedy that.

Narwhal and RingoJS as CommonJS or ServerSide JavaScript solutions are interesting as was porting a code snippet from Python to JavaScript.

However I then begin to wonder about interaction between client side and server side JavaScript, and if virtual DOM, or DOM based interfaces to Files or Databases can make jQuery even more versatile. I also start thinking about possible flaws in various security models which  a solely JavaScript client + server web based solution could have.

I don’t speak Albanian yet unfortunately, however I am know more familiar with over 100 of the world countries’ currency units, thanks to another code snippet I spent a few days developing in C#, all in Monodevelop and some on my SmartQ V7.

My SmartQ V7 will eventually become a replacement for my phone even though it doesn’t have any GSM telephony. But I hope to continue developing a Gentoo based firmware for it. I already have a some what working chroot. I also have identified why the microphone doesn’t work with the default firmware.

I discovered just how versatile this new device was when my EEEPC / laptop was out of action for a few days whilst I waited for a new AC adaptor. Normally I dismiss the scene in Bruce Almighty, when he abuses his new found deitic abilities, to the tune of “I Got the Power”.

But upon the arrival of my AC adaptor , the song was bursting out of my mouth, if only for a few short seconds, before I smirked and sighed. Julian now has turtles.

How is that relevant to anything you might ask ? Well the simple answer is similar timing with respect to delivered goods (his turtles arriving just before or after my AC adaptor). The more fun answer has to with Albanian currency linking to a type of turtle(which may not be the type Julian has but is the most common type for pet turtles), along with linking to the most awesome character in Inspector Gadget, (Inspector Gadget also having powers and adapting to circumstances).

Hopefully the explanation is obtuse enough, that it doesn’t spoil the magic entirely, then again it probably will. I recently finished reading Asimov’s essays on chemistry which I throughly enjoyed. One of which compares catalysts to magic or the illusion of being magic like.

I am still job searching, along with slowly progressing on a wide variety of side projects. I had written some fun JavaScript for this WordPress Theme,  however it got omm nomm nommed (accidently truncated doesn’t sound as tasty) to zero bytes, so I will have to rewrite it.

I had written a short section on politics but I am reluctant to post it now, as I am not sure if I want to refine it and develop it into some sort of article or essay.

Hope everyone is having fun now that most people’s exams are over,

Best wishes,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Before you panic and scream about the absence of my traditional eye burning (someone elses words not mine) purple and green theme, (which you won’t do, because as far as I know my reader base is asymptotic at present).

This is just a notice to inform you that I have working headphones now, so audio blogs are incoming, along with lots of other fun content, and lots of interactive web, also I am finally redoing my WordPress Theme from scratch.

Well almost scratch, I am actually starting with the HTML 5 version of Starkers by Nathan Staines . Hopefully after all these years of waiting the web might be ready for the actualisation for some of the designs in my head.

Other news, that should go in another blog post, but won’t due to timing constraints at present includes,

• the fact I have graduated from my studies (Bachelor of Information Technology with Distinction and a Bachelor of Mathematics)
• I am currently looking for work (Preferably in IT, but anything involving solving problems or providing solutions works as)
• Sideprojects I have been recently been working on include, the bris2600 website and irc bot, web scrapers in Python with Beautiful Soup, learning Perl ( making a templation tool), and a program for automated scanlating of manga and comics (in C++ with QT

If people have requests for website features or theme features or discussion topics, just message or email me or leave a comment.

Presently it seems the only comments I get are the spam ones…

Best wishes and thanks for your time,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Had the cluster meeting yesterday, thanks to those who showed up. We have more hardware now, and a newer gentoo install , all we need now is for piggy to find the scsi drives and the ball will be rolling. Otherwise all that is needed is a few additional spare parts and to setup the SAN box on the Dell Poweredge 2500 rather than the Poweredge 6400 (which must be vampiric or emo, or both and a twilight fandell as it likes to cut me and not find disks. Our magnificent effort was in spite of the lack of internet and the rain . (prorata makes me rage, not to mention the raining on our parade). On the mention of twilight, it is an awesome song by bo(with the accent on top of it, that this wordpress install doesn’t render , because the server is ubuntu and  not gentoo and doesn’t get locales)a (boa, the british band) and nothing more.

Got results back, got high credit for advanced data visualisation, and 43% fail for partial differential equations, because I botched the exam. I really don’t feel like taking supplementary exam for it, so I will probably just try and get an RPL elective instead. At least  I can solve PDEs analytically now in non exam conditions. Looking back at my academic history, the more subjects I do the better I seem to do at them, chances are they are just getting harder towards the end of my degrees however.

Next on the schedule includes the UCSB iCTF which will have me busy most of friday afternoon and saturday morning till lunch, then Laningrad (Lost in Time ) on the 8th, then my 21st on the 24th. Filed bug upstream for intel compositing kde crash, and there is already one filed for the printer-applet crash, but noone seems to have heard of my font issues with firefox and amsn, guess I will be using pidgin for a while longer.

There will probably be another cluster meeting in January, not sure when yet. The Smartdevices V7 has finally made it to dealextreme so I have to decide whether I deserve / desire it as birthday / christmas present or not. I feel like cooking, mostly likely desserts including cupcakes, but I probably won’t get around to it.

Still looking for part time work preferably in IT, which means more cover letters and applications to submit. Neopets guild is awfully quiet which means I probably won’t be revamping / remaking their CMS / Portal until the activity resumes. Still haven’t unpacked my books yet.

Update: piggy / dell poweredge 6400 now boots in 5.5 minutes with memory check w00t !!!

Update 2: firefox / amsn font issues fixed my moving autohinter and subpixel rendering font confs from conf.avail to conf.d in /etc/ directory

Hope everyone is remembering to enjoy themselves in their busyness as Christmas approaches.

Best wishes,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Since when did conversation or talk mean sex ? Honey , we need to talk ? …, Oh well don’t get me started ranting on oversexualisation of society.

It would be interesting to see what changing the underlying anthropological social structure would be however, but I doubt it would happen outside of communes.

Managed to move to a place with a pool and that is able to get internet, which is nice. Firefox is currently been replaced with Konqueror, as firefox seems to have flash, tab / nspr and uim crashs …… I haven’t gotten around to chrome yet. ivanhoe is fixed and the GIR cluster is relocated.

UPDATE: Firefox and AMSN and various applications (xconfig anyone) seem to have missing text syndrome, I have enabled subpixel hinting (something I hadn’t had to touch since KDE 3) and that brings some of the text back on Firefox but not all. If anyone knows what the fix is , I would appreciate it, as far as I can see freetype, xft, fontconfig are fine, as is mesa and libdrm with KMS on Intel, …..

A side note, the transparency of icons in GTK apps also doesn’t seem to be working. Weird ….

It is quite hot here and I find myself wishing that I was in Canada, Japan or Cyrogenics lab. Interesting things I came across include kysoh’s tux android, buglab’s bug embedded platform and smartdevicesq v7.

I started on backporting the dvb modules to 2.6.11.12 but had nothing but issues, so I may need to progress with plan b of porting all the official thecus interface inside the gentoo chroot and bumping up the kernel to something reasonable.

KMS and fbencoder are having fun (not working), strangely enough they worked with the previous kernel, maybe it is because the theme I am using doesn’t have a 1024×600 config, although I am telling it to use 800×600 one.

Not happy with VTK regarding the audio visualisation project I was working on, but at least I learnt Marsyas and QT, I may continue with Marsyas in attempts to write voice authentication for kdm / gdm.

Saw The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus with people from uni, was quite disappointed in it, it reeked of Faustian cliche and the imaginarium wasn’t surreal/ phantasmorgical enough for my liking, you can show people aesthetics and beauty but unless you mind boggle and captivate them you are doing the entire bringing a person’s imagination to life wrong …

The deja vu of the series of the day’s events and the disparity and lack of cohesion between the conversation and other social dynamics didn’t ameliorate the circumstances, however a trip to candy store may have …

Currently job seeking and resuming project work that was suspended or delayed during the university semester.

Hope everyone is having fun,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

I am currently surviving. Zombies haven’t eaten me yet. I need to focus on the project I am working on for advanced data visualisation.  Words not said are currently interesting me at the moment. Golden drops of silence, as I attempt to diagnose which SSH no longer seems to work on my NAS (thecus n1200 , ivanhoe).

I currently blame the new firmware. I am hoping to either get it working again or end up installing Gentoo directly on the nas. But I need to focus on partial differential equations study.  I managed to scour various pdf texts on areas of interest, so that I can start reading again.

Raon Digital (The makers of the everun note), seem to have gone out of business, which reaffirms my decision to get an EEEPC instead of a the everun note, in spite of missing out on the dual core 64 bit 7 inch touchscreen goodness.

I have code to write now, but I hope to have recorded an audio or video blog later, so you can look forward to that.

Best wishes

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234