Blog entries from February, 2007

As of today is is now possible to leave comments on these posts.

The advantage of using an existing tool for my blog is that all I needed to do to enable comments was to turn on the appropriate option and to copy over (and modify) the appropriate part of the default theme into my custom theme. There was also some effort involved to remove the comment functionality when I first setup the theme but that was a long time ago.

In contrast I would have needed to spend a considerable amount of time building the functionality if I had opted to write everything from scratch. Score one for the first B in bend/buy/build.

(Time will tell if anyone leaves a comment, let alone reads any of these posts…)

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon Treadly and Me which is a locally bases cycling blog. As well as some other cycling related blogs it let me to Bikely, a Google Maps mashup that allows you to enter in your favourite bike paths.

Tonight I entered in my commute:

• Glen Waverley to Monash Uni
• Monash Uni to Glen Waverley

As well as my ride from earlier in the week:

• Experiment in riding from Glen Waverley to the city

The current plan is to enter any future rides and I am also considering adding some of my past rides.

A few years ago Weird Al played a concert in Melbourne, part of the tour for Poodle Hat (maybe for Running With Scissors, I am not sure which). Since then I have regretted not going.

Tonight I found out that in a few weeks, Friday 23 March 2007 to be precise, he will be back as part of the tour for Straight Outta Lynwood. Unfortunately I already have tickets for the airshow on that day.

I guess I will have to wait until the tour for his next album…

Remember the decked out JX that I was musing about last week? This evening I picked it up and the first thing I did (even before booting it up) was to disassemble it to see how the 5.25″ drive and hard drive connected.

It is an interesting design that I will aim to document in photos Real Soon™.

I took the today off work and decided to ride into the city. However this was a ride with a difference. Instead of taking the established route of the Scotchmans Creek and Gardiners Creek trails I set myself a small challenge. Follow a close as possible to the railway line, keeping to the south side as much as possible. This choice was based upon bits of path that I had seen from the train.

Where did I go?

First the sections that I was familiar with:

• Glen Waverley Station to Syndal Station is along Coleman Parade.
• From Syndal Station to Mount Waverley Station there is a proper path all the way along the reservation.
• After the Mount Waverley station carpark it is back to the road that follows the line past Jordanville Station and almost to Holmesglen Station where a dedicated path takes over.

• After a detour around (or through) Holmesglen Tafe it is onto one end of the Scotchmans Creek Trail to East Malvern.

  Read the rest of this entry…

The decked out JX I spotted on eBay ended a few days ago with no bids. Since then I have exchanged a couple of messages with the seller which has prompted me to think about the purpose of my collection.

In the beginning I had an Apple IIgs which had been our family computer. Then I discovered hard rubbish collections which has been the source of around a third of my collection. Apart from unique items such as the Two Page Display none of these items have been particularly special.

Another quarter of the collection have been obtained for free from other sources, mainly through friends or relatives that gave them to me instead of throwing them out, or their work throwing them out. This is how I got the SGI Indys, the SGI O2, the IBM JX and the Dauphins.

The final five twelfths (approximately) of my collection were purchased almost exclusively from eBay with very few of them costing over AU$100, mostly lower than AU$50.

For most of this time my primary goal was to have an example of every computer manufactured by Apple. Unfortunately once I was well on the way to this goal I realised that there isn’t really anything special about a lot of them. For a while I have been thinking about reducing the total number of items and there are a lot of Macintosh models that I don’t really need to keep.

So what is my current goal for the collection?

• Significant Apple computers and peripherals; and
• Non-Apple items that are special, unique or rare.

Originally I didn’t think that I would pay more than a third of the asking price for that JX. Then I am thinking of paying two thirds but now I am considering going even closer the the asking price in order to get such a rare item…

After taking photos this evening I continued on and took photos (no descriptions yet) of my Macintosh Portable that has been sitting around since September last year.

While taking the photos I was able to get it to power up, unfortunately only as far as a sad mac…

When I got home today a IBM PC Convertible was waiting for me.

I believe this may have set the record for getting photos up (surpassing the previous record of one day) as it has been in my possession for just over three hours. Also it is exactly forty-eight hours since the eBay auction ended on Sunday night…

This morning they started repainting the lines in the carpark at work. What colour? Blue of course as a AU$280 permit will soon be required to park in what used to be free.

We have also been told that proper bicycle storage will be installed as part of all this…

Only two weeks since getting the Apple IIc Plus I have put up some photos with descriptions.

I also sorted out some photos of the ethernet and localtalk components that I have as well as the OneScanner I got a few weeks ago.

A few weeks ago Alfie finally launched his secret project, a free competitor to realestate.com.au and domain.com.au. This is the project that has been taking up every moment of his time, so much so that he ‘had’ to pull out of presenting a paper at OSDC.

What does this have to do with Web 2.0? In his launch post Alfie claims that he made a Web 2.0 site.

Huh?

Where is the API? What about an RSS feed of the search results? Where is the community? Why isn’t it easier to create an account? Why do you even need to create an account to list a property? Why can’t you comment on listings? All these are characteristics that I would expect from a Web 2.0 site and are even part of the definition on Wikipedia.

When I raised this at work the next day the response I got was that anything after the bubble was Web 2.0. And not just sites that started afterwards, this included sites that survived the bubble, you know, all those garish sites lacking in content or community.

So what is my point? I don’t really have one, this is just a rant that leads into an ingenious video explaining Web 2.0 that has been making the rounds of the news sites over the past few days:

Even Lessig blogged it which says something all of its own…

Right now there is a IBM JX listed on eBay. Don’t I already have one? Yes, but nowhere near this good.

While my JX features a display, system unit, a pair of keyboards and some boot disks the system listed includes:

• the rare hard disk;
• the as rare 5.25″ drive;
• software and manuals; and
• a swivel stand for the display

The listing has six days to go, with no bids so far, and it is even located in Melbourne which means I could pick it up. However there is one problem, the listing price is almost AU$1000 which is about three times what I would consider spending…