Blog entries from December, 2003

Just got back from seeing Return of the King for the second time. Friday was because Phong was down from Canberra and tonight was in Gold Class with tickets that I paid for a few weeks ago…

It definitly makes the trilogy and I think I’ll have to get around to seeing the extended version of Two Towers.

The CompactFlash / IDE Interface card for Apple II computers that I ordered last week for my Apple IIgs arrived today. It is very professionally done with a good reference manual.

I want to play with it now but I have Christmas stuff to do…

In the process of shuffling hardware around today I discovered that the computer I was changing to (P3-933, 128MB, Matrox G450 dual head) used RAMBUS. As the spare 256MB SDRAM DIMM that I brought from home wasn’t going to fit I had to roll back the shuffle. However I still got the G450 card by pulling an AGP Matrox G100 out of an old Pentium II for the RAMBUS box, it only does 1024×768 anyway.

There was also a shuffle of people and desks today so after we got back from Yum Cha I moved my computer and associated bits from my desk in the middle of the room to a desk up against one side that was vacated by someone moving down the corridor. As well as moving from a corner desk to a straight desk I will now be able to place my bike behind my chair against the cupboards, as next year there will be someone sitting where I used to store it.

Also I dropped off my signed letter of offer at HR first thing this morning and finally got myself an ID card…

When I got into work today there was a pile of ten 17″ LCD displays, we must have got a bulk discount.

Half of them were given to various people, myself included, which actually raises a problem. For the past two weeks I have complemented the 19″ CRT that I have been using for most of the year with a 17″ CRT connected to an old S3 PCI card. I replaced the 17″ CRT with the 17″ LCD but the S3 can’t output the desired 1280×1024 so the picture was nice and fuzzy. Tomorrow (last work day of the year) I’m planning on doing some hardware juggling at the end of which I will end up with a box with a dual head Matrox G400.

The other dilemma is that I’m now running a 19″ CRT and a 17″ LCD, the most annoying difference is in the brightness levels, ideally I would like to use a pair of 17″ LCD’s. My only hope there is either to get one of the remaining displays or do a swap so that someone who got one of the new displays will use the 19″ CRT that I currently use…

Courtesy of a friend at work I have discovered Win2VNC and x2vnc. Basically they let you control two computers, each with a monitor, via the keyboard and mouse on one of them. What is very funky is that you could have a ‘desktop’ made up of a number of different OS’s, ie Windows, Linux and MacOS…

I’m tempted to grab an unused box and monitor at work next week. Put on a fresh install of linux and add it to my current dual monitor (windows) setup.

now have a new job, in exactly the same chair at the same computer doing the same stuff. The difference is that I am now full time instead of casual…

I got tired of Damien cancelling on me so today I decided to go for the ride anyway:

• Caught the train to Victoria Park
• down to Dights Falls
• up the lower park of Merri Creek / Capital City to St Georges Rd
• up St Georges Rd and others to the ring road
• east to check out part of the Darebin Creek Trail that was skipped on a previous ride
• west to the start of Merri Creek Trail, passing the construction of the Hume bypass
• down Merri Creek Trail to St Georges again
• west along Capital City Path to Royal Park, checking out Edinburgh Gardens on the way
• up the Upfield Bike Path to Coburg station
• train home…

Just over 50 kilometers and was pretty good except for some residual effects of the torrential rain earlier this week; sections at the upper end of Merri Creek were washed away so the path alternated between nice concrete, jagged rocks and drifts of soft fine gravel.