Mickblog

I was browsing through realestate.com.au last week, and look what I found.

I checked the place out. They were putting in a few new light fittings and new blinds, and that’s about it

So I went through the tortue of moving out so they could do some minor renovations and charge and extra $35 a week.

ARRRRGGGGHHH MUST KILL TO STOP THE BURNING

So as I mentioned before in my previous post, I am currently available for work.

Although I would be most suitable for unix/linux based work using C/C++ or perl, given my experience I could confidently take any of a number of roles, including system administration, architecture, project/team management etc.

I am looking for up to 6 months of contract style work.

My resume is here. I can be contacted by phone on 0418 438374 if you prefer. Feel free to mention me to your company or your friend’s company or whatever.

Mick.

I’ll give everyone a quick rundown of my life since, uh, 9 months ago.

Goddamn, has it been that long.

On August lst year I left utbox.net, after having been rewarded for turning the business profitable by being demoted. I took on a contract job at ThreatMetrix and worked there until Feb when I had enough money to live on until late May. This was going to be the break to make up for 3 years solid on-call duty.

So I spent a month doing nothing essentially. I was supposed to relax and get to work on a couple of projects but repeated harassment from the insurance company about the car crash more than a year ago didn’t help. I spent most of April visiting my sis in the US for the first time since she left for there about 3 years ago, and visiting my 2 neices for the first time ever, so that was good. But I also received notice, one week before the flight out, to get out of the place I was renting by end of May. I decided to visit the US anyway, leaving a month to move out. This turned out to be insufficient thanks to the state of the rental property market at the moment (I’m competing with 10-20 applications!), so now, after spending the last 4 weeks of my holiday plus another week packing and trying to find a place in vain, all my stuff is in storage and I’m staying with my mum in Penrith. Now I am living off my credit cards and still have to find some more work, then find a new home (somehow) whlie working full time in the city from Penrith. The move has/will cost a month of holiday and about $3500. Oh, and during all this I’m hopelessly in love with a girl that doesn’t want me.

After all that, I don’t feel like I’ve taken a break.

Goddammit everything better fall into place or I swear am going to go postal.

At least I got to see my nieces.

10 million dollars is enough so that you would likely never have to work again, even if you spent extravagantly (by most standards). You could leave that to sit in a bank account and make six figures on the “abysmal” interest.

So you wouldn’t have to work anymore. You would have to find something else to do with your life.

What would you do?

Mick.

An interesting combination of shows to watch on the same day is An inconvenient truth and Walking with Monsters.

The former explains how if we don’t stop pumping carbon dioxide into the air, the amount in the atomosphere will increase by something like 5-10 times, and the temperature will increase and the polar ice caps will melt and so much biodiversity will be destroyed and so on.

Then the latter tells, among other things, just how much the earth’s atomophere and climate has varied over its lifetime. Figures were given for the oxygen content of the atmosphere, from about 30% below to 40% above current levels. Carbon dioxide leverls varied even more - at one point they were 12 times as high as today. Average temperatures reached as much as 50 degrees above modern levels, which of course meant no ice caps. And through all this, life, in some form, thrived in those conditions. New species were born, others died because they failed to adapt.

I find that very reassuring. In the big scheme of things there’s actually very little we can do to destroy the cycle of life. At some point, millions of years from now, new life will evolve to adapt to the Earh’s environment, whatever it may be at the time. And it looks like it will be vastly different then to what it is now, regardless of our actions.

Of course there is still the issue of what we will do to the planet in the meantime, and thus what we will have to live with until we evolve to adapt.

These Wikipedia articles have some info on the subject.

For those that were wondering why knobbits.org was misbehaving,

Yesterday I was alterted to the fact that connections into my server were timing out. I checked up on this and discovered that the server’s IP was effectively being blocked. Pings to said IP were being responded to, but not by my machine. Other traffic to the same IP wasn’t making it to my router. Other IPs on my public subnet, however, seemed to be working just fine.

I have since moved the server to a different IP address (DNS servers were on the same address, fun) and everything seems to be behaving now, as of this morning.

If anyone has any idea why this might happen, let me know.

I needed a function to do this to help me do my budget. It was PITA to write so I’m sharing it in case other people find it useful.

Here are versions in perl, python and OpenOffice/MS Office macros. There are also functions to do the reverse, and some extra cruft, but it’s still there.

(I started with the perl version because I didn’t want to be distracted by an unfamiliar language, wrote the office version because I wanted it to work in my spreadsheet, and wrote the python version beause I thought openoffice supported python macros and I wanted to use a real language)

Basically the way it works is do approach the taxed vs untaxed income graph as a series of straight intervals, and finds the one that is intercepted by the taxed-income line in question. The tricky part was figuring out the numbers for each line, given a list of the tax brackets and medicare levy thresholds (well, threshold).

The result is actually ambiguous for a small region around the $50k (taxable) mark, because when your taxable income hits $50k and you get the medicare surcharge, it’s an instant $500 jump in tax. The function returns the lowest taxable income for the taxed income passed in these cases.

The tables in the functions are for the 2006/2007 tax year, and have the medicare brackets set assuming you do have to pay the surcharge (ie don’t have health insurance).

Anyway, hope someone out there finds it useful.

So while I’ve been looking for work I’ve also been dabbling in all sorts of things. Let’s see:

- I modded my x-box, which you already know about

- I have bought a PS2 and plan to mod it as well :) I sure hope this is a moddable version - I haven’t found a web site yet that identifies its version from its model number.

- Been having a play with gEDA and a, um, *cough* evaluation version of Altium DXP (the new name for the Protel electronics design suite, that costs a house). geda is pretty complete in the sense that it’s got the functionality for designing very complex boards, but its interface is awful at the moment. But I’ve only so far tried the version that is in dapper’s universe, which is a year old now. I’m thinking of either helping out with it, or starting a similar project (not on my own of course)

- I’ve bought 2 big fat text books, one on engineering mathematics and one on linear circuit analysis. These two books, along with The Art of Electronics , I plan to go through slowly and thoroughly. We’ll see if I persevere.

- For a while there I thought I could get a contract doing some embedded development. I narrowly missed a job doing some kernel coding which I would have loved, so I kept looking for a similar kind of job. Looks like that was as lucky as I’ll get. Anyway in the meantime I spent a bit reading up on kernel programming.

- Been playing with povray again. I finally found the scene files for the povray scene that got me into raytracing so long ago. It’s improved a lot since then. It’s got media, radiosity,photons (what they’re for I don’t know) and isosurfaces, which can essentially render almost any aribtrarily complex mathematical function, with a bit of guidance. Turns out the rendering algorithm isn’t impossible to understand. Regardless, it’s cool. If you can figure out how to play with the math you can make all sorts of interesting shapes

- Been collecting a list of places where I can get cheap surface mount components, so when I am ready I can
start making prototypes with them. I reckon using SMD will making the process less painful, since it will at least mean I don’t have to drill at least 2 holes for every component on the board.

- Searching for an FPGA development board. FPGAs are essentially huge reprogrammable logic circuits - you can turn one into a CPU, and more. I’m hanging out to design my own processor :) I learned the basics of processor design in a subject about it at uni many years ago. Never had the chance to apply it.

this is a simple ebay sniper, designed to be run from an always-on linux box inside screen(1).

It’s different in that I tried to make it resistant to changes in eBay’s site layout. It did break when I tried it a few days ago for the first time in a year or so but it was able to be fixed without too much trouble.

Hell, I’ll take a shot at it.

I’m looking for someone that needs a linux driver for their device. For the right job, I can do the work for payment of a flat amount, agreed upon beforehand and paid upon completion, or at least almost entirely upon completion. I can agree to a timeframe for completion, and support the work for 12 months or so after completion.

If thiis sounds interesting to you, give me a yell. (I can be contacted by phone on 0418 438374). Or feel free to refer me to someone who you think might be interested

I’m taking this approach because I would like to get into this kind of work, and the only way to do it as a job is to work for peanuts. A device driver is a well “contained” project (little room for scope creep etc) and the effort involved can be estimated pretty accurately.

Mick.