Sam's Insane Ravings

I managed get up in time to make it to the airport in time for my 6:40am flight. The flight to Auckland was OK. I got through most of part I of Moonrise during the flight. A damn good book. It saved me from watching Scooby-Doo, for which I am grateful. The only downside was the rather large, snoring person sitting next to me, but it was only 3 hours.

Getting to the motel I'm staying in until Friday let me glimpse a reasonable selection of the Auckland area, since I caught a shuttle bus that went to various hotels, and one home. It's always encouraging when the driver is trying to find out where he is going by reading a map while driving a minibus and trailer down the motorway.

The motel is quite nice, far too large for just one person, but since I booked late all the cheap stuff was taken. A huge selling point is that there is a huge supermarket a couple of minutes walk away. This supermarket has amazingly wide aisles, three trolleys fit side by side. I'm used to Coles in Bondi Junction which is a congested obstacle course most of the time. And New Zealand obviously has saner liquor laws than NSW, since you there is beer and wine filling over an aisle of supermarket space. No spirits though. So if my talk tomorrow goes badly I'll have to go to the liquor store just across the road...

I'm staying North of Auckland proper. But there is a rather large shopping area with a Westfields filled with crappy stores (and strangely a gym occupying the entire top level, which is a small level I admit). There's a tree lined street filled with all kinds of shops as well, and a really ugly beach a block behind it.

I had apple cake and coffee at a great place called Addiction which it would seems serves cake, coffee, liquor, and tapas. And the two people who were working at the time were really nice. I suspect I'll be having coffee there again before I head to Wellington.

Addiction is such a cool name for a place that clearly deals mostly in coffee and alcohol. Next door is a Japanese place, which is in the running for world's most unimaginatively named restaurant. Wasabi. Now if it was an Italian place, that might be a funny name, but it's Japanese and that name sucks.

Obviously I also found an internet place, in fact I found two, both only five minutes or so from the motel, so I'll get my internet fix.

I checked the conference program again (which was lucky) and realised my other talk is also tomorrow. So I have two talks to do tomorrow. Neither of which I have finished the slides for yet. Neither of which I have practiced even once. And the first one is in the first session of the conference, and is a paper I really don't like, and was hoping Judy would do the talk for. I've made sure to put her name first on it (alphabet schmalphabet) so hopefully she cops more blame than me... On the bright side, that means the remaining three days of the conference will be enjoyable. No talk looming ahead, just hearing about hopefully interesting things from others.

While riding the seemingly eternal shuttle bus (I suspect it took longer to get from Auckland airport to the motel, than it took to get from Sydney to Auckland) I got to listen to the bus radio. When the shuttle bus radio chatter wasn't going on, which wasn't that often.

It was tuned to some talk show. They were whinging about DOC trying to wipe out some animal or something. The announcer at one point lamented about the apparent death of the real kiwi man. Who would camp in the bush and carry a 302 everywhere he went, and keep the population of those animals in check. They've been replaced by latte sipping wimps it would seem.

And Howard got a mention on the radio and TV news here. For his ridiculous claim of the right to ignore international law and bomb the crap out of anything that could be associated with a terrorist in some other sovereign nation. Clarke distanced herself from that ridiculous idea.

Sachin Tendulkar was at Auckland airport with the biggest pile of luggage I have ever seen. Since neither of the two people who look at this page follow cricket, he's arguably the world's best current batsman - he has the highest career test batting average of the current test players, and the eigth highest of all time.

In an attempt to keep stereotypes alive it appeared that every Indian in Auckland had got a job as a cabbie today, and they were all at the airport to get photos with the Indian cricket team. There were hundreds of taxis parked at the airport. And lots of Indian men harrassing the cricketers.

I really must go and write these two talks, since I have to be up reasonably early again tomorrow.

Well the talk I was most aprehensive about is over!

And it went better than expected, I didn't get a Nobel Prize nomination for sheer brilliance or anything, but I didn't get booed off either. There were one or two vaguely not bored faces in the crowd even. I'm just glad that no one decided to argue a point with me.

So I have one more talk to give at the 6:00-6:50pm session. That's late enough that I suspect many people will have headed back to hotels (though there is an 7:00-8:30pm informal welcome and invited talk that might keep some people here, then again is might drive saome off, there's also the fact that the free busses don't come until 8:30pm.

The other two papers have very asian sounding author names. From my experience at conferences asian's often give bad presentations. Including far to much text in their slides, and just reading out the slides as their talk. I don't know if it is a cultural thing, or if it's a language thing (if I had to give a presentation in a language other than English I'd do far worse than just read out my notes), or a combination of both. I'd need to see a presentation in their native language to tell, and I wouldn't be able to understand that so I couldn't tell anyway.

A couple of things I neglected to mention last night. I'm staying in Takapuna, and the region seems to be called the North Shore. The actual conference is at North Harbour Stadium, which is no where near the harbour, though it is north of it, many kilometers north. It's a but like calling the shopping center in Chatswood, North Harbour Shops. Except that you can see some of the harbour landmarks from Chatswood, and you can't see any of Auckland from here. Addiction has a great byline on their sign I forgot to mention: by the hit by the gram by the kilo, wonderful stuff.

Oh well I've been discovered sitting on the floor in the corner with my wireless card, so I better go and mingle... I wonder if their wireless network reaches the nice looking grassy oval outside...

My second, and last, talk is now done.

I was last in a group of 3. The first speaker I really couldn't understand, but from the diagrams and things he seemed to be doing propogation network stuff. The second speaker was a Japanese lady, who epitomised the read out the slides and notes instead of giving a real talk school. She also gave a Mathematica HOWTO in the middle of her talk which was strange.

I did OK... Didn't get rotten foodstuffs thrown at me. Got 3 or 4 questions which were of the constructive type, and not the You're work is a load of garbage type. I messed the answer to one though, and didn't sell as hard as I should have. Overall it was good.

So now I have three days of watching other people suffer. Hooray!!! There is always AIED to stress about though. This time stressing about getting accepted, instead of about giving a presentation...

Anyway must grab some food, before it is all gone...

The conference days are far too long. There's not enough opportunity to have dinner with people, when the day doesn't finish until 8:30pm, and the site is in the middle of nowhere so you can't afford to not catch your bus back to your accomodation.

The stand out talk so far was introduced by the speaker as:

An unscholarly broadside at WebCT

My concern now is that Wellignton airport keeps getting shut due to thick fog. I fly to their on Friday night. And more importantly from their on Tuesday. Since I'm then catching a flight from Auckland to Sydney I really can't afford to be late. Especially since they are both seperate cheapo tickets with different airlines, so neither of them will care if I miss the connection...

This conference has a high number of presenters who just read out their slides. And a bunch who read out from notes. Some of them seem to have reasonable ability in speaking English. If I want to stick to my theory I guess I could assume that while they can read out english text well enough, they can't formulate english sentences on the fly.

It's annoying because it provides no benefit over just reading the damn text. There is no contact with the audience, since the presenter doesn't look up from their notes that they are reading from. And there's no adapting to the audience, so they keep the same pace and bore the audience about things where the pace is too slow, and lose the audience when the pace is too high.

I'm not very good at presentations. I tend to fidget a lot, due to nerves I suspect. I never prepare enough, but experience now means I at least get the length pretty much right. However, I do try and adapt to the audience. Focusing in on things which seem to interest some of them, and speeding over things that seem to be putting everyone to sleep.

Force people to use overheads I say. At least that involves some physical movement and the occasional upside down or back to front slide.

On a completely different note, those yummy fruity alcoholic drinks are darn cheap over here. Six dollars for a 4-pack of Cruisers, for example. That's New Zealand dollars, so about $5.40 Australian, or 15 cents US by now I guess. Housing is cheap, and alcohol is cheap, I really have to convince Anna that Auckland is a wonderful place to live. Of course there's the fact that they are currently doing aerial spaying to kill some moth, basically flying crop dusters over people's houses and dumping pesticides... I can't decide is cheap alcohol is worth having retarded children.

Oh well the little red low-battery light is flashing, so I'll stop rambling.

I'm currently sitting in the grandstand of the stadium the conference is, doing email and stuff like that. And it just started raining. The wind picked up a lot, and the rain is maing a very relaxing noise on the stadium roof.

There's that wonderful smell that comes with rain as well...

I'll try not to think about the pesticide that is probably falling with the rain :)

On an unrelated note, my new digital camera goes through batteries almost as fast as I'm going through the really crappy coffee like substance they have here...

I decided to go to the conference today, and spend the extra $30 the taxi will take to get the extra distance to the airport. I can't get the conference busses since they go to late for me to make my plane.

Glad I did, since there I sat through a great session with two great talks and one non-boring talk. Nothing to do with my work but very interesting. These education conference make me think I enjoy teaching, of course a quick glance at my MARKING directory will change that...

They play a really strange form of cricket over here called Super Max. I thought one day matches were silly, but they are nothing compared with this. It's a one day match, but with two innings for each team. Of 10 overs.

As if giving an entire team just 10 overs to bat in an innings wouldn't be enough to encourage them to smash at everything, they also made a few other changes to the rules. Wides are penalised 2 runs, and I think a ball is called wide more easily than in real cricket. They also have the Max area behind the bowler. If the ball ends up in it then the runs are doubles. So running a single on a straight drive which goes maybe 2/3 of the way to the boundary is worth 2. A boundary in that area is worth 8. And a six over that area is worth 12.

As you might expect, it's really stupid. A newspaper article I read called it hit and giggle which sums it up nicely. Apparently the average innings it 5/105. Madness.

Oh well must go and look at these posters...

I arrived in Wellington last night. As I guess is usually the case there was a strong wind, and the landing was great fun.

I finally got to sleep in this morning, since there is no more 7:25am bus to catch. And I had drinkable coffee instead of the garbage at the conference. And I've found an internet cafe...

Wellington on Saturday is strange, the area near where Sarah and Trent are seemed to mostly shut down around 2. As I walked further more and more places where open. And this internet place is open until 10pm.

It's raining, which I guess is also normal round these parts, so I spent basically the whole day inside. TV is even worse in New Zealand than it is in Australia.

And I finished Moonrise on the plane. Great book.

It appears my entire stay in Wellington is going to be grey and wet. I've ben wandering around for a few hours now, and managed to walk past the same internet cafe I was in yesterday, there's no shortage of these things in Wellington, my random travels have taken me past five or six. I managed to get the same machine as I used yesterday, that's nice because I only have to type the fist few letters of the web sites I want to look at..

I had a look in an art gallery today. They had a Colin McCahon exhibition entitled A Question Of Faith. It didn't find the art very interesting I must admit, lots of text and black and white. The painting the exhibition is named after gives a reasonable example:

An obviously catholic artist, with the number 14 featuring in a lot of the works, referencing the 14 station of the cross. The work got darker as the years went on, which if I was in the mood to spend some time examining them I'm sure would have been interesting. The artist was clearly beginning to doubt his faith, by the choice of verses (and the spin put on them) used in the later work. Then again that could have been caused by the selection of work shown.

Some blue sky and sunshine today, after the morning rain anyway.

The TV weather had a strange map last night with a sun symbol over Wellington and a rain cloud symbol over Sydney.

I spent the day wandering around again, with my sister this time, and then by myself. Went to a museum of sorts which was pretty crap. Had lots of stuff about volcanoes and earthquakes. Basically giving you the impression that being in Wellington was pretty damn stupid since the fault line between the pacific plate and whatever the other plate is runs through the middle of town...

There's some kind of hotspot too, which they claim spawns new volcanoes every so often. Again under Wellington. Whoever decided to build a city here was obviously a nut.

Wellington is quite small and is surrounded by hills (other than the side with water). The hills are mostly covered with trees, and are only a few minutes away from the middle of the city. There are residential buildings on them, but they only creep up part of the way leaving lots of trees. It looks strange, like a city was just dropped into the middle of the bush. Of course there's a tunnel under them, and stuff on the other side, but you can't see that.

Flying out of Wellington should be just as fun as coming in. They are focasting 45 km/h winds gusting to 85 km/h. At least I guess that means there won't be the fog they had last week that kept closing the airport.

I'm so glad out politicians are so compotent.

Apparently there are rumours that one of our politicians is too dim to work a sliding door.

Good thing we have such bright people running the country...

I'm finally back at Uni after my NZ trip, and doing stuff at home. ADCS is on today, and luckily enough Andrew has done the poster and even registered for the conference...

I arrived to be greeted by a lovely fsck failed, run manually message on my uni machine. Obviously the power went out at least once while I was away (since there were bushfires and everything, that's expected I guess). /var/ and /usr/ where thouroughly trashed, screens and screens of messages about inodes having a directory tag when they weren't directories - I ended up just using -y, since I got bored holding down the return key for the two minutes the first one took. I'm too scared to have a look at thye damage that has probably been done, it's all logs and mostly stock debian stuff anyway (though /usr/local/ isn't seperate, but doesn't contain much...)

There's a really funny advertisement on the bus stop outside Wentworth. A bacardi breezer ad, with the bat thing logo on a woman's neck. Someone has stuck an if you can't think of anything just use a half naked woman type rant on top of it. This person obviously expects all woman in advertisements to wear a chador (Fred Nile won't like that). Since said woman is fully clothed, for the nightclub setting that the ad is probably trying to invoke, she's positively rugged up.

I finally got around to spending 2 minutes looking at the damn php code behind the HTML display section of this site. And added the missing $CUR_LINE++. So now the log stats are actually valid XHTML like they claim to be, and since I'm back to using postprocessed webalizer they are strict as opposed to transitional (aside from the old modlogan ones).

I put some crappy NZ photos in my little used photo section.

Notice how many of them are photos of people.

So harley won't get to see the mythical woman whom I tormented Anna with stories about...

Anna and I went to Sumo tonight. Yet another Japanese restaurant that displays zero creativity in the naming. Anna of course had the Dinner Box, which is a bit of everything. I had the seafood tempura, since even though Eggplant tempura is my favourite (and I assume you would get more of that in the vegetarian tempura) I like the prawns as well.

Since we walked, and hence I didn't have to do any driving (and just the smell of alcohol will put me over my P plate limit...) I got to try the cool sounding drink I noticed last time we were there (which was a long time ago). And in doing so I think I've found my new favourite drink, and also the thing which will plunge me into a life of alcoholism.

Tsunami which is the Australian of version of this (or that is the Japanese version of Tsunami - I can't read Japanese to get a clue.)

Wonderful stuff, not sickly sweet like those colourful fruity alcoholic breezers and cruisers I also like. And it seemes to be only $64 for a case of the stuff which is only $2.66 a 250ml bottle or so, say $3 with shipping. On par with breezers I guess... I wonder if a Monday order could be rushed to me on Tuesday and hence before Christmas???

I won't try and describe the stuff, since I've had a scotch and dry and half of Anna's kalua/frangelico/baileys/cream/honey/ice cocktail thing since then... I suggest you give it a try next time your at a Japanese place that has is.

The only worry, is that the ingredient list reads more like some female beauty treatment containing such things as:

• milk serum
• calcium lactate
• collagen
• antioxidant (300)

Computer game reviews have slowly but surely gone down in quality over the last decade (which is about when I looked at them every so often). If I was cynical I might think that the advertising dollars the game publishers pay the magazines and the free stuff they send them encourages the review authors to say nice things.

I did write a few reviews when I worked at a youth service which published a paper each term for high school students. There was no actual pressure to say nice things. However, since we were a little youth service and selling advertising to meet the costs of each edition was an effort, we relied on publishers sending us games to review. We also used those games as prizes in the paper, or used them in the after school youth service stuff. So there was a self inflicted pressure to not piss EA off too much, so they would keep sending us stuff. That was easy to do though, since we got enough games for enough platforms each term, that there was always one or two which was good enough to say nice things about.

Of course, I enjoy whinging about crap things more than saying nice things about good things (so I am looking for crappy sci-fi books, since so far all the books I've reviewed here were good - since they wer rereads of things I liked, or old books by known good authors - aside from that children's book...), which made writing said reviews less fun.

These days I don't read magazine reviews at all, but I read website game reviews every couple of months when I remember they exist. Of course along with my preference of writing I enjoy reading reviews of bad games mroe than good games, assumming the review author is compotent at kicking things when they are down.

My completely unscientific look at the 9 latest reviews on the PC section of games domain (there's one hardware review which I skipped, of course they'll be different as soon as a new review is posted) gives the following scores:

• 1 star - 1 review
• 1½ stars - 1 review
• 3 stars - 2 review
• 3½ stars - 1 review
• 4 stars - 1 review
• 4½ stars - 3 review

My experience with computer games tells me that one third of the pre christmas games are not worth 4½ out of 5. Then again maybe there's been a quantum leap in game quality in the last few years...

Anyway the reason I started raving, was to point out the 1 star review above, which is for Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings. Anyone with any gaming experience, knows that movie tie in games suck. But apparently rhis isn't a movie tie in, this is a book tie in cunningly released to milk some publicity from The Two Towers release. It's not the greatest bad review I've read, but it's reasonable. Here's teh opening paragraph from, which indicates a fun to read review is starting:

Apparently the literary works of J.R.R. Tolkien aren't good enough. No, the writings of one of the masters of modern literature, and the acknowledged fore-father of a huge proportion of the fantasy genre must be given a passing nod, but ultimately ignored when it comes to adapting said writings for a computer game. Of course this makes sense! That is, if you're happy just to churn out a gravid unappealing quasi role-playing game which will sell on its name alone, in order to cash in on the Christmas market.

Games Domain review

The point summary pros and cons are good too:

• Pros
  • Environments are nice
  • Makes a decent drinks coaster
• Cons
  • Takes massive liberties with the source material
  • Gameplay is extraordinarily dull
  • Cutscenes are wooden
  • Voice acting is dire

Maybe I should have got my dad something else for Christmas :)

I (being slow when it comes to reading email) just realised I missed out on the lightning talks at the Sydney.pm meeting when I was in New Zealand.

Why C++ is better than Perl in absolutely everything. by Luke Burton, was I'm sure a great talk...

Mary mentioned this problem in the her 22/12/2002 diary entry.

So here's the first solution that came into my head, which I'm sure is not optimal in any way shape or form (obviously don't read it if you only just read the problem and want to solve it yourself - since once your brain is polluted with one solution, finding others is usually hard):

class Prisoner
        def initialize(id)
                @id = id
                @count = 0
        end

        def Prisoner.meeting(prisoners)
                @@leader = rand(prisoners.length)
                @@prisoner_count = prisoners.length
        end

        def visit_room(light)
                if @id == @@leader
                        if light.on?
                                @count = @count + 1
                                if @count == (@@prisoner_count-1)
                                        return true
                                end
                        end
                        light.off!
                elsif light.off? and @count == 0
                        @count = 1
                        light.on!
                end
                return false
        end

end

It's ruby since I prefer it over python, and the harness code to actually run the simulation is:

class Bulb
        def initialize()
                @bulb = false
        end
        def on?()
                return @bulb
        end
        def off?()
                return !@bulb
        end
        def on!()
                @bulb = true
        end
        def off!()
                @bulb = false
        end
        def switch!()
                @bulb = !@bulb
        end
end

class PrisonersShell
        def initialize(pris_class)
                @prisoner_class = pris_class
        end

        def simulate()
                bulb = Bulb.new
                prisoners = Array.new
                visited = Array.new
                100.times do |x|
                        prisoners.push(@prisoner_class.new(x))
                        visited.push(false)
                end
                @prisoner_class.meeting(prisoners)
                day = 1
                while true
                        selected = rand(prisoners.length)
                        visited[selected] = true
                        if prisoners[selected].visit_room(bulb)
                                if visited.include?(false)
                                        print "\nOops... they all die... after ",
                                                day, " days in prison\n"
                                else
                                        print "\nWoowoo... free at last (after ",
                                                day, " days in prison)\n"
                                end
                                break
                        end
                        day = day + 1
                end
                return day
        end
end

It takes the one hundred prisoners a bit over 10000 days to work out everyone has visited the room. So in practice (which is such a likely event :) it might be better to just stick to probability and figure that if you leave after a decade is up, the every billion year asteroid hit has more chance of happening that day than every prisoner not having visited the living room.

Checking Google News just now I thought for a second they might have added country checking (since google redirects to the appropriate country site, google.com.au for me, if available they obviously have checking in place) to the article selection.

Since the top article in the Sports secion on the front page was Lehmann ruled out of fourth Orange Test which is probably of little interest outside Australia and I guess England. And the second article was about the Indian cricket board deciding to follow the rules for team naming for the world cup, something which I doubt Americans would care about much.

I tried using an American IP and got the same results. So I guess there wasn't much happening in the world of American sports (and more global sports than cricket) over Christmas.

Oh and I guess I should mention, Christmas was good. Lots of chocolate. And I have a really big semi-circle of Double Brie to eat tomorrow. Couldn't find any Tsunami's too drink while watching the cricket though... I have some Saki though, so I can try and recreate it I guess.

I hope Sam remembers to warm his Saki.

Yvan's log for boxing day 2002

Anna earns enough money that I can in fact afford sake which doesn't need to be heated since it has subtle flavours instead of overpowering woody flavours.

In winter it might be different, but in summer I'll stick to varieties that are best served slightly chilled. Well actually I don't much like wine, beer, or sake by themselves. I'm one of those sinners who prefer to mix them with something, and those somethings are best cold :)

In August 1839 a bill was passed in Parliament to introduce penny postage, and on January 10, 1840, the first 112,000 letters carrying the new one-penny postage stamp were delivered. That was the day Richard Cobden of the Anti-Corn Law League knew he had dound the way to get the league's message out to the public, and he was reported as saying, "There go the Corn Laws." He was right about how postal reform would help his cause. In one week, three and one-half tons of league pamphlets were delivered in Manchester alone.

chapter 1 of The Pinball Effect by James Burke

The Pinball Effect is a good read, skimming over various scientific breakthroughs, inventions, and their interactions. Even covering early spam...

If the British and the Australians want to keep cricket as a white and colonial sport, then they should do so alone because we are not interested in their rubbish," Mr Moyo said.

ABC News Online

Cricket is a colonial sport (well almost, the Netherlands might dispute being a colony of England), and the cricket administrators are having a hard time increasing the popularity of a game which takes 5 days to play and often ends in a draw.

White is a bit excessive tough, here's the countries who will be in the World Cup which all this uproar is about:

• Australia
• Bangladesh
• Canada
• England
• India
• Kenya
• Namibia
• Netherlands
• New Zealand
• Pakistan
• South Africa
• Sri Lanka
• West Indies
• Zimbabwe

I wouldn't call that a list of white countries, I'd argue that whites make up a minority. Though I guess Zimbabwe might classify India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh as white, but England sure wouldn't. Even including South Africa as white (since the players are in the vast bulk white) doesn't give whites a majority.

In fact there's a nice even split amongst white, African, and Asian countries (especially if you count the West Indies as African, which since this seems to be all about skin colour seems reasonable :). Note that Canada, Netherlands, and Namibia aren't Test playing or One Day International playing nations, and hence have the guest spots. One of them will no doubt become the next Full ICC member (ala Bangladesh at the last World Cup).

Campbell Parade and Queen Elizabeth Drive will be closed to traffic but an extra 380 busses will be organised for the night.

events.nsw.gov.au for New Year's Eve 2002

an extra 380 busses, and you thought the english on this web page was bad!

[update] Talking to harley I realised that everyone who doesn't live in Bondi probably won't understand my complaint about the perfectly fine english. So I'll point out that the bus route being talked about is route 380, giving another interpretation to extra 380 busses. It seemed funny when I was drinking...