Blog entries from October, 2005

Today I went for my first ride (I’m not counting commuting to work) since April when I rode down the Maribyrnong River Path.

My day unfolded as follows:

• Train from Glen Waverley Station to Richmond Station
• Rode through Yarra Park (where the MCG is) to Jolimont Station which saved me from having to go around the loop and then wait at Flinders Street Station
• Caught an Epping bound train to Thomastown Station
• From Thomastown Station I rode down to the bike path along the Metropolitan Ring Road and then west until I reached the new Hume Freeway
• I detoured up the Hume Freeway to the City of Whittlesea Public Gardens, where there is also a pedestrian bridge across the freeway, and the back down the ring road.
• I took a couple of photos where the Hume meets the ring road as it was under construction when I last saw it almost two years ago
• I continued west along the ring road to Jacana where I took a number of photos from the pedestrian bridge over the station of the goods line meeting the surburan line which I regretted not taking when I started here when I rode the Maribyrnong River Path
• Continuing on I came to the start of the Maribyrnong River Path at Brimbank Park. It was good to see that the path that ran down under the E.J. Whitten bridge has been resurfaced.
• Pressing on along the pretty boring path I eventually reached the top of the Kororoit Creek Path
• There are two things I can say about the Kororoit Creek Path: It is boring and it does just end in the middle of nowhere like the maps show. The concrete path just stops behind some factories with apparently nowhere to go…
• Instead of turning around and negotiating my way along side streets to Sunshine Station as I had planned I pressed on and found a vacant block between some factories which led me out to Somerville Road. The ride from there to Tottenham Station wasn’t very pleasant as it is industrial with a lot of trucks.
• After I got off the train at Footscray I rode across to Docklands on the path along Footscray Road. When I got to Citylink I was fortunate enough to catch CLF1 and CLF4 at the automatic rail crossing that wasn’t there when I last went through
• Once I has traversed Docklands and found my way around the back of the Melbourne Exhibition Centre I followed the path along the light rail to Port Melbourne and back.
• I crossed back over to Docklands and made my way to Birrarung Marr along the north bank of the Yarra (normally I would use the south). Making my way behind the Holiday Inn was interesting as it seems to discourage through traffic.
• After taking some photos back towards the city I returned to Richmond Station for a train home…

Just over 80 kilometres in just over 4 hours of actual riding…

A while ago I realised that a signifigant proportion of items in my computer collection are not actually computers. They are actually peripherals, in particular Apple peripherals. To reflect this I have removed the old Apple accessories page that I had and created a new section under Apple entitled peripherals.

The items that currently have more than a single photo are:

• Apple PowerCD
• AppleDesign Powered Speakers
• AppleDesign Powered Speakers II
• Apple External Hard Drive
• Apple Adjustable Keyboard
• Apple ethernet components
• Apple Portable StyleWriter

Through my semi-regular random skim through things such as popular del.icio.us links I can across a posting on the Signal vs. Noise weblog about not breaking Parkinson’s Law. One of the comments to this referenced a page on the Canadian Society for Biomechanics site entitied Laws and Principles (some humourous) of Life.

There are two things I want to say about this:

Firstly I want to comment on how the social nature of the web (I don’t really like that name but it is appropriate in this context) can bring together interesting pieces of content. All without a search engine and knowing what I was looking for. I one sense I was letting the community direct my navigation…

My second comment is that a lot of these laws and principles ring true. In particular:

• Parkinson’s law
  “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”
• Brooks’ law
  “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”
  (this is the classic law from The Mythical Man-Month)
• Dijkstra’s Prescription for Programming Inertia
  “If you don’t know what your program is supposed to do, you’d better not start writing it”
• Gray’s Law of Programming
  “n+1 trivial tasks are expected to be accomplished in the same time as n trivial tasks”
• Logg’s Rebuttal to Gray’s Law of Programming
  “n+1 trivial tasks take twice as long as n trivial tasks”

Logg’s rebuttal is proven true whenever a manager is under the expectations of Gray’s law…

When I left work today someone could be mistaken to think that the construction is nearly complete as all of the walls and windows (internal) have been installed and the builders even took away all the rubbish from the open plan area…

However I wonder if they are even halfway through as there would be at least the following jobs left to do:

• networking and phones (over fifty people and each person has a phone and two network points)
• power and lighting (some of the lights in the suspended ceiling have been reconfigured but most haven’t and the switches need to be put in walls instead of hanging down…)
• plastering (there are a couple of places where the joins between plaster sheets needs to be filled)
• painting (we are all looking forward to the white, beige, light blue, darker blue and bright orange colour scheme)
• carpeting (how long does it take to glue down carpet tiles?)
• installation of the cubicles (then these need to be wired for power and comms)

Only five weeks to do all that? Maybe…

It is now after the second working day since we moved offices and all the walls of where we were are gone and they have even started framing up one of the new walls. It will be interesting to see how fast the construction will progress…

I am planning to take a large number of photos every night (really late afternoon as I have been getting to work early for the past few weeks) in order to document the process…

Two photos of the Disk IIc external floppy drive that I obtained recently are now up on my Apple IIc page.

Photos and descriptions of my PowerBook Duo 210, one of my recent additions, are now up…

Last friday I mentioned that we has been told that we were moving back onto campus to make room for the builders. Fortunately since then clearer heads have prevailed and while some of us have to move back to campus it will be the team who looks after a certain product for the university. This does still mean that the people in the same office as me will be moving… just to the office next door.

The ironic thing is that three of us still have to pack everything up in boxes as if we were moving a long distance as we will be in on a training course in the city when the removalists come on Thursday…

Instead of sorting through the photos of my recent additions I spend some time this afternoon adding descriptions to the photos of my Power Macintosh 6360.

Technically it is now two years and one day since I started this blog. I really should get back to learning about development techniques as I intended to do…