Mickblog

Okay, so I’ve decided I’m not famous enough and I’m going to show off a bit to attempt to get more famous. So sue me.

I am going to start putting some of my small but not insignificant work on my web site for public use and amusement. Some of it will even be useful.

But not this.

It’s a raytracer I wrote to see if I could do it. It does absolutely nothing that povray can’t do, but I think it’s cool.

And yes, I know, I really have to make my web site look more, uh, mature.

This guy makes a living decorating the interor of people’s homes to look like the intererior of the Enterprise. And I don’t mean the navy ship.

There is a trade magazine centered around the elevator industry. Wow, what an exciting industry that must be. The opportunities to rise up in your career must be staggeringly high.

BWAHAHAHAHA.

Mick.

It’s official.

This must be what winning the lottery feels like. I’m as happy as a girl can be.

I was reading through Slashdot’s interview with Billy West and midway through it casually implied a confirmed comeabck of Futurama. Interesting way to find out.

“WHAT? WHAT THE FUCK??!”

A little part of me had always thought it would be cool, and make sense, for Futurama to come back. Apparently Fox ditched it because it wasn’t wholesome and “family” enough for them, and of course because it didn’t bring in enough bling. The creators thought no other network would buy it. When I heard that I thought “What about Comedy Central? They’re brave enough for South Park”. But it never happened. Until now.

Maybe the world is not so screwed up after all.

So yeah, in case you can’t tell, I like the show and am happy to hear of its return :)

(And yes I know I’m late by about 2 months)

You know what sucks about blogs? You can’t just say whatever you want because you’ll get sued or something. So I have to be careful what I say here.

There was a company general meeting today, at which the decision to effectively let this other company buy our shell was voted on. I didn’t atttend, mostly because I thought I would effectively have no voting power - the largest shareholder has (had) about 35%, and nobody else wanted to vote against him.

This is a BIG deal we’re talking about here - the “other company” owns technology which looks like it is going to make it possible to get oil out of oil shale. There is allegedly enough oil in shale deposits to keep the world running on fossil fuels for another few centuries. And this company could get royalties off anyone that they license this technology to.

Turns out the biggest shareholder didn’t vote - he’s apparently too busy with things bigger even than this. If I had attented the meeting I would have had full voting power.

Damn I’m sorry I missed that.

I would likely have abstained anyway. I could have voted to keep the business going with just utbox for a bit longer, but then I would be in the same position I am in now (all the responsibility and none of the power), and I wouldn’t have made many friends. I could have blown the other company’s plans out of the water (the will likely play a big part in accelerating the greenhouse effect), but they would likely have just found another way to achieve their aims.

But at least I could have held that decision in my hands for a while, and maybe given certain interested parties a fright while I callously tossed it about in the air while I decided what to do with it.

So now I have essentially no financial stake in the business I’m working in. The way things seem to be headnig, the future for utbox is not one I am going to want to be a part of, so I’ll be handing the job of running it over to its owners, whoever they may be at the time. Don’t panic if you’re a customer - it’s not going to be wound up, I’m sure of that much. Regardless, I’m back to square one, in a sense. But, I have more interesting plans for my next big adventure. Stay tuned.

Has anyone else ever done this besides me?

sloccount is the program used to come up with that estimate of the “cost” of the linux kernel, that made some noise on slashdot way back when.

I have been running it on a few of my projects, to attempt to get an idea of what my programming time is worth. Now I know the figures given by that program include a whole bunch of cruft like documentation and administrative overhead and the like, but even if I multiply by fractional factors to account for these, the results are, um, interesting.

Rather than post the results I got, I’ll show what I’ve been working with:

• leechnews.pl, a perl usenet binary leecher, is about 70 hours of work.
• ray is a simple raytracer I wrote. There’s about 50 hours of work in this. (here is a tarball)

I’ve also been using stuff from work but I can’t show you that :)

I’d be interested to see other people’s projects and respective sloccount numbers, if you’re proud/brave enough.

As of yesterday I now own two Nintendo DS’s, one standard and one of the new
DS Lites.

It’s been out here for, what, 3 days now? I got it because I will anyway, and also because I have a few multi-player DS games which I’d like to try.

Funnily enough it seems to have been released in Australia before the US or Europe. Weird. Here’s a short review for those that care.

It’s not a huge improvement on the size of the original, but it looks nice. GBA cartridges jut out a bit, compared to the original where they fit entirely into the unit. There was no thumbstrap thingy in the box, but it had the hook for one so you can grab one from an original DS or whatever and use that. The sound from the speakers is a little more tinny. The screens have different ideal viewing angles so they can sometimes look a bit washed out compared to the original, depending on how you use it. On the plus side the screen brightness can be increased from the startup menu to something like 4 times that of the original. The start and select buttons feel a bit mushy and hard to press. The battery is the same, but (once again) the charger has its own special plug specially for the DS Lite (different even from the GB micro).

I sure have enough to complain about don’t I? :) All in all it’s fine, but don’t get one unless (1) size and weight is a big deal to you, (2) looks are a big deal to you, or (3) you are a consumer whore like me, and must have every console Nintendo ever produce.

In other news, My internet connection is shaped, so sorry to those who are finding it unresponsive. I’m working on getting it fixed (by replacing the ISP) but apparently it’s going to be a bit of a ride - I am with iiNet and although I could churn to them ~3 years ago, they have sinced moved me over to their own DSLAM and I can’t churn back out. So I have to apply for a new connection as usual.

Lastly, I am considering making posts that attempt to give quick overviews of what I have learned about various aspects of starting/running/growing a business. To help me decide, if you are interested in reading this sort of thing, or especially uninterested, post a comment. I may, at least, post to my blog but withhold it from planet SLUG.

Okay, so to complement that last post I’ll let everyone know where the hell I’ve been the past few months.

Mostly I’ve been buried in my work, in an effort to make it both lucrative and enjoyable. So far I’m not doing too well on either account, but things are going to change very soon. Check out ASX announcements for BLE. Whatever happens, I am going to make sure I come out of the mayhem with some measure of personal freedom. I’m sick of living like this.

In Jan I got a car. ONE MONTH LATER I was involved in a crash that was not at all my fault. Nothing serious, but I didn’t have insurance. The other car had comprehensive but the insurance company seems set on trying to get the money out of me, or at least not having to pay me anything. Luckily there was a witness who was willing to help out, but the insurance company is still trying to bluff its way out. I would pursue it but I just don’t have the time. I can fit the bill for my car, it won’t kill me. I have bigger issues. The car is repaired now and looks like new.

A few weeks ago binks, my beloved server of everything but the kitchen sink, started misbehaving. One of the hard drives decided to freeze up. I checked it out and both its drives were VERY hot. Silly me disconnected the fans in the mobile HDD racks because the were making noise (”they’ll be alright, they passed the 1 hour test!”). So I got fancy new aluminium HDD enclosures with DOUBLE BALL BEARING FANS, and also purchased a new drive to replace the one that was misbehaving, just to be safe. So after shutting down the machine about 5 times in total in the process of getting the new stuff in, the OTHER drive, the one that showed no signs of being near death, suddenly and completely died.

Thank $deity for raid1. Well, I didn’t have the ENTIRE drives mirrored, but all the important stuff was.

Oh yes, and I’m an uncle, again. Kimberley Brandt, born 6:00 on 02/06/06. I gotta get to the US, soon.

I’ll try and get into the habit of making slightly more regular posts so everyone remembers I exist.

As a result of past events and my abhorrence to working for the man, it looks like I am turning into a businessman. An Entrepreneur. A mover ‘n’ shaker. A PHB!

That last one is what would likely pop into the heads of most people that are likely to be reading this. That, or something less polite :)

Whether or not I become a successful businessman remains to be seen. This is one of the reasons I’m writing this and future entries on my journey into this world. I want to take the opportunity to treat it like a kind of experiment. My story will act as inspiration, or as a warning, to those who are considering a similar leap.

Also I will get to act as a kind of ambassador, to give all the self-confessed anti-corporate-machine geeks reading this the view of one who has experienced it all from the other side. The same may go for the other way around, in time.

Until relatively recently (2-3 years ago) I used to be all anti-commercial and so on, but a few realisations I have made over the past couple of years have changed that.

First, after running what I consider to be a real business for a couple of years now, I have realised that a business can be a process of creation, rather than one of control or theft or whatever it is most people think of it as. I’ll talk about that more in a later post. For now, the business I run provides a service that enables any business to save a significant amount of money, time and hassle. This is a positive thing I’m doing. I’m not saving the world or anything, but I’m doing something.

Second, I have become confortable with the idea of being, uh, “financially abundant”. Oh fuck it, rich.

There seems to be a pretty strong belief, among the working class at least, that having money is only for nasty evil people. Or they would like to have money but this belief still stirs in the back of their mind and it holds them back. I used to think like this myself, until I made the first realisation I just mentioned, and also because hey, there are an awful lot of people with lots of money out there that are less deserving of it than me. This really hit me when I was one day properly confronted with the concept of having the kind of money that I has previously assumed only came into the hands of the Elite. My first reaction to the idea was essentially one of fear - it’s not me, I’d become the thing I hate, I wouldn’t know what to do with it etc. But I pondered for a while about what I could do with a serious amount of money, and ideas started to come to me like, I could help bring my family closer together (a significant portion of it is in the US at the moment). I could give a friend food and a place to stay for as long as he/she needs. I could make really significant contributions to charities. I could start a charity! or a linux distribution! and so on. All these ideas pretty much blew away any inhibitions I had for letting money come my way.

I have already passed the hurdle of thinking I can’t start a business. I essentially already have - there is little left of the business I’m running now that is not my own work. It’s getting regular income, and growing steadily. A similar realistion to the evil-rich-guy belief came to me too - there are a lot of idiot managers and such out there, that somehow manage to hold $200k jobs. What can they do that I can’t? Being a businessman is not a birthright, not in the free world. There are courses you can take or, hell, you can just borrow books from the local library. Shit, there are a whole bunch of people at the top - I mean the very top - that didn’t even go to uni.

So as I go along I am going to write about my observations and insights into how the business world works, both in principle and in reality.

I saw Mark’s entry about this and I must voice my concern. The sentiment of certain “experts” is that we are going to run out of oil in 2025 or so and then we’re going to “go back to the Stone Age”.

I don’t share their pessimism. Here’s why.

While I won’t argue the amount of oil we have left, I can say with confidence that we’re not going to all suddenly go to our respective local petrol stations one day and find big “SOLD OUT” signs on all the pumps. What’s going to happen is petrol prices are going to increase between now and then, like it already is, until nobody can afford it.

This is important because when petrol does start to become expensive, the free market will kick in and work properly to come up with alternatives for transport (and other things) for us. In about the time we have, the Internet was turned from something localised to the defense industry and a few universities into a global network that everyone has already gotten bored of.

It’s already happening - we’re seeing prototype hybrid, electric, hydrogen and biofuel cars already. It’s just that they’re not being mass produced or heavily developed yet because nobody really wants them yet.

The view of these “experts” seems to be that none of these alternatives are viable, for one reason or another. I’ll avoid getting into the details for now and just say that their views tend to ignore current and future developments in the different technologies. I’ve read into some of the stuff that’s being developed, and some of it is pretty impressive and encouraging. Yet the doomsayers blurt out things like “electric cars use batteries and batteries suck”, “hyrdogen can explode”, etc etc. and seem convinced that this closes their argument.

Now when petrol starts to become properly expensive, entrepreneurs will start putting some serious money into developing these alternatives, and things will start moving.

Yes, there are other things to consider, i.e. oil isn’t used just for petrol - it’s used for cleaning agents, plastics etc. But the same free market rules apply. I imagine we will figure out a way to synthesize most of these other materials, if we haven’t already.

So yeah, there will be some friction while we figure out how to live without oil. But it won’t be with a new Stone Age or Armageddon.

For those who occasionally check up on my blog (both of you) you might have noticed that it was gone for a while.

The server holding my blog self-destructed. Which was kind of annoying, since the same server also received my mail, mail for about 5 other people, contained 2 CVS repositories, a dozen web sites, and gigs of precious pr0n and warez.

How did this all happen? I’m not sure but I think it can be blamed on XFS. Silly me, not heeding the warnings.

It’s mostly all still there but there were some casualties. Files got scattered all over the place in lost+found, and some disappeared altogether. The CVS repositories were both damaged, and lots of system files were too. Essentially it meant rebuilding the server from scratch.

This all happened while my dad was over for a few days whlie he helped me look for a car. So I had to coordinate that with making sure nobody lost their mail. And it all started while I was on 1 hour of sleep. Great fun.

I’ve recovered everything cept for a bit of CVS history and a couple of other bits and pieces. There’s still some stuff to go though. If you see something missing or broken let me know.