danny’s space

2007 seems to be the year for transitions.

In the ASO Biology program, there’s a new director and deputy director. I spent the last three weeks in Canberra with a great bunch of staff teaching a keen and tight-knit bunch of high schoolers. Our new director hasn’t been through the program before so it was a bit tough for her to get accustomed to our teaching style, our culture, and our strange sense of humour. But Sarah, the new deputy, did a fantastic job of holding things together during the transition. Nevertheless it was a bit tough for everyone, especially after losing three key staff members, and losing another one after this year.

At church, Ernie our student pastor left us after two years to go work for a church in Eastwood after graduating from SMBC. Because of his high level of involvement with the youth group, his absence will definitely be felt. The new youth pastor, John Menzies, returns to Australia with his family after 5 years of mission in Uraguay. He’ll be working with the youth ministry at ND, but again, a challenging time of transition is in store. Especially since I’m apparently heading up the youth group team this year, with a diminished number of leaders after losing a fair number of experienced leaders.

And starting a PhD sometime in March. The first year of a PhD, people say, is mainly spent poking around not achieving much. I guess I’m fine with that, as long as I can do other stuff apart from just PhD work. Honours was difficult because I basically had no life apart from research - squeezing in youth group was hard enough. Hopefully this year my time will be more balanced.

Also, moved to a new server after getting sick of the slow speed of webhostingbuzz. With hostgator now, which provides faster speeds but the price increase is also noticeable. Took a while to migrate to the new server though; especially difficult doing it through the ANU connection in Canberra.

Big movements in 2007. It will be an interesting year, that’s for sure. Meanwhile, I’m still zoned out from spending the last 3 weeks in Canberra, and can’t actually think or do much. Will take a bit to recover.

Okay well it’s not really hacking, just revealing passwords hidden behind those annoying (albeit useful) asterisks. NirSoft has saved my butt many times after forgetting a password, or needing to discover a password on a computer where it was already hidden by asterisks.

Like just then, I had to find out the password for an ADSL connection to access the net. Log-in to a connected computer, use the Dialup Password Recovery program, and voila.

Been wanting to do this for a while, so finally went out and bought a webcam (albeit a Microsoft one…) for use as a security ‘monitoring’ device. Quite a bargain as well - the price was mislabelled so I got $11 off there, and there’s a $40 rebate on the thing as well. Sweet.

So anyway, the next step after the relatively painless install was to look for software that’s able to:

• Do motion detection - taking a picture every 30 seconds not only takes up disk space but may miss action when it occurs
• Upload via FTP - what happens if your computer is nicked? The photos go with it…
• Timestamp - what’s the use of a photo if you don’t know when it was taken?

Those were the basic features that I wanted in the software. There’s quite a few free programs out there that can publish webcam shots, like Yawcam (doesn’t do motion detection), CatSpy (great for video, but no still image support), LogiSphere (slow, takes up alot of resources), and WheresJames Webcam Publisher (many features, tricky to set up).

I ended up going for the WheresJames program, and it works quite well. A few spurious features (e.g. decorative frames) but overall well-designed. It doesn’t take up that many sytem resources because it has its own link to the webcam instead of relying on the webcam software (like LogiSphere does). Yet to get the video working though. Also, uploading to FTP isn’t that trustworthy within the program, so I had to use an FTP synchronisation setup using SyncBack which was scheduled to run every 15 minutes with Solway’s Task Scheduler (since the minimum interval of Windows task scheduler is 1 day).

So if you have a webcam, you can easily hook it up for it to act as a security device. Hope this helps someone out there catch the crooks that break in and steal stuff.

Online tests used to be the craze in high school. Dodgy websites asked you questions about your kitchen utensil preference and bowel habits to determine what type of dog you were. Sometimes personality tests also have a bad wrap, putting people into distinct ‘categories’.

But there are some uses that stem from knowing your ‘personality type’. They can help you understand in a more concrete way how you relate to people, how you deal with stress, what to watch out for, and so on.

A good one to use is the DiSC test. This is useful in group situations, figuring out how each person in the group handles tasks and relates to each other. We did this at our church’s leaders’ retreat earlier this year and it was quite helpful. It categorises people into the categories of Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness (there are other descriptions that are largely similar). Free online versions of this test are available at this link and also on this current website (I didn’t realise this was like the DiSC test until I did both!). A description of the DiSC personality types may be found here, or within the temperament survey. Note that the DiSC test should be performed in terms of a ‘role’ - that is, you should take the test in terms of your mindset in a particular role or position, like youth group leader, team member, etc. It makes a difference.

One test that’s been around for ages is the Jung-Myers-Briggs test. This is the more well-known test that assesses your personality in terms of four factors: Introversion/Extroversion, Thinking/Feeling, Intuition/Sensing, and Judging/Percieving. The most useful indicator I find is the introversion/extroversion factor, which tells you where you need to gain ‘energy’ from (very useful to understand!). A nice description of this test can be found here. Free online versions of this test can be found here, here, and here.

So go forth and find out your personality types. It might help you understand how you relate to people or how to recharge your batteries. For DiSC, I’m a high D and high C. For the Jung-Myers-Briggs, I’m an ISTJ.

In these days of YouTube and Google Video, it’s nice to be able to put up a short home video online without having to use these services. For example on a blog site, which may be still largely accessible to the outside world but at least isn’t on one of these mass video sharing websites. Unless of course that’s what you want to do…

Anyway, the file format these services use is called Flash Video with the file extension flv. A free encoder is available that will transcode AVIs, WMVs, MPEGs and whatnot into the FLV format. Then just upload the FLV to your site, and use the free Flash Video Player to embed your video. You can view an example of these on the 180 videos site. The process is pretty painless if you know basic HTML.

The good ol’ US of A style with turkey! Apparently these start in the early afternoon; and there I was thinking it was actually like a traditional Asian ‘dinner’ which started around 7. But it was great of Michelle (from Penny’s lab) and her husband, both relatively fresh from the US, to host an early thanksgiving dinner for the associated labs today. Nice to get everyone together in an out-of-lab setting for food and chat. Only problem was that it was in Quakers Hill, which is about as far west as Prospect Reservoir. A few observations about westie roads:

• Everyone drives at the speed limit.
• Roads are very wide. A two-lane ’surburban’ road easily trumps the Pacific Highway in width.
• Pedestrian users of westie roads are scary. They come right up to your car while walking past (ever heard of the footpath???) and stare at you.
• There is an unbelievable amount of road-side parking.

So anyway, back at uni tomorrow to do some follow-up work on my project. Hopefully won’t be too long. Sara finishes tomorrow which is good. Many movies to catch up on, like Da Vinci Code, X-Men III, Bridget Jones’ Diary II (I didn’t just type that…), High School Musical… Fun!

Also, another thing about being on ‘holidays’ is that you actually don’t get much holidays because people (who are still going with exams and whatnot) pile things onto you. I’m not complaining, it’s great to be able to help; it’s just an observation. Today after church was a bit crazy - Nuggy and I were running around trying to recruit people for ministry teams next year while trying to organise the signing of Ernie’s farewell book and also trying to entice people to go to Ernie’s farewell BBQ. Not a big list so far which is disappointing.

Using IE7 now. Firefox 2.0 sucks bigtime. It randomly hangs about 5 times a day on different websites. I’ve backed up my settings, uninstalled it, downloaded v1.5.0.7 from the releases directory on the Mozilla site (thankfully all the releases are there), and am installing it now. I guess this is an example of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”, or don’t rush to install new software but wait until the next minor version is released.

- Update -

Reversion to 1.5.0.7 went fine. No need to restore bookmarks or other user data, these are not removed during uninstallation. No hangs yet on 1.5.0.7. A few extensions and themes weren’t backwards compatible, but a quick visit to the Mozilla extensions site and a bit of trawling through the extension version histories spat out older versions of extensions that were compatible with 1.5.

So, spilled some sugary sweet potato soup liquid onto my laptop keyboard yesterday. It was okay to start with, but as the water evaporated, the keys got more and more stuck, and the spacebar along with the Ctrl and Alt keys refused to go down, or up for that matter.

Good news is that I could remove the keys and the flexy support things that hold the keys in place. To do this, shut the laptop down, unscrew the keyboard screws from the back of the laptop, and click off the plastic holders on the face of the keypad. Then, using a small flathead screwdriver, pop the key tops off. All keys use the same type of mechanism to hold them down. The spacebar is similar, but has guide wires that are also connected to the keypad base and need to be removed. Once the keys and the structures that hold them in place are removed, give them a good clean with warm water.

Now for the bad news. Don’t use nail polish remover, even the ‘non acetone’ type. The one I used had something acetate in it, and look what it did to my spacebar

Nasty. The flash makes it look worse than it does under ambient incandescent lighting. But the nail polish remover burnt little holes in my spacebar and corroded the plastic. Not good.

But at least the keys work now, hmm.

After cleaning, just pop the key supports back, and then pop the key tops back onto the supports.

Meanwhile, Firefox 2.0 sucks. It has crashed so many times, but at least comes with built-in crash recovery. It even remembers what you type in textboxes, to an extent. I say stick with Firefox 1.5 and wait until the next 2.x version is out before upgrading.

Stuff doesn’t just stop after hand-in. Neither does stuffing of the face. During writing, I was sitting at home eating Kettle chips all day, 8am to 2am and typing. Now that it’s all done, the celebratory meals are in full swing.

Last Monday and Tuesday the honours bunch had late lunches at the Taiwanese place, Sunflower, on George St. Highly recommended! Quaint, cosy atmosphere, great Taiwanese food. Wednesday had lunch at Wok Station on Glebe Pt Rd with Poker. Bit pricey but tasty nonetheless. (I don’t have a very developed food vocabulary. It consists of ‘yum’ and ‘yuck’ basically). Thursday was lunch with Litty and Shereen, who handed in Friday before last, at Thai La Ong on King St in Newtown. Great to catch up with people I haven’t seen in ages. A quite time at home on Friday, then a filling dinner with Sara on Saturday when we attempted to cook pasta. Then dinner with Nerd Con last night at Cafe de Macau in Eastwood, which was surprisingly, erm, yum. And today, lunch with people from the various labs at Forestor’s Lodge in Glebe. And sometime this week, lunch with the honours bunch (who have now all finished!) somewhere in the city.

My scales aren’t going to be happy!

Yeah, couldn’t think of a better title. Random g33k stuff here really.

New updates to software. Firefox 2.0 is out - it’s not that good; a few new features like spell check in fields, but many extensions are incompatible with it. Evernote 1.5 is out - not much change either apart from largely cosmetic updates that I can tell. IE 7 is also out - beware when installing, there’s no cancel button! The status bar just does that scrolly thing, doesn’t even represent the true status, it just tells the user that something is happening.

Meanwhile, if you want to automatically hibernate your computer at a set time, use the Scheduled Tasks in Control Panel, and set it to run the command:

C:\Windows\System32\rundll32.exe powrprof.dll, SetSuspendState

Set a date and time and click OK and it’s set. Of course you need the proper power management settings on your computer, but if you can hibernate normally (manually) then this should work.

Well, IE installation is telling me to restart. I think I’ll shut down and play with it tomorrow.