I read a story about an Apple hacker that lost his job, but decided to just keep turning up at work and eventually finished the project and had it included on the system.

It shows how organizations could work if the mess of middle-management (or in this case, any management) is abolished. A really interesting read.

There's comments on Slashdot if you're interested.

I bought some new shoes today while I was out Christmas shopping with Maggie. We were at the Galleria in Morley, and had done some seriously efficient shopping; the place was a lot less busy than I expected, which helped. We unloaded our shopping into the car, and went back inside for round two.

I went off and wandered around for 15 minutes, before stepping into Rebel Sport. Up the back of the store they have a huge range of shoes, and with my current pair of Royal Elastics well and truly worn thin, I thought I'd take a look at the offerings.

As Eddie would say, "half!"

Pretty much the entire range of men's casual shoes were half price. They had some shoes that were $160 going out for $80. The pair I liked were $100 down to $50, and being a large-footed fellow (you know what they say) I was in luck - a size 13 pair was available.

They're called Puma "Azur" but the only pics I could see online were of either white or coffee shoes, and mine are more of an off-white, bone or beige colour. Hence my need to snap an original photo.

They're wicked-comfy, and will come in handy at the next all-night-dance-a-thon.

Last night/this morning my internet connection was being a bit dodgy. I am happy to blame the D-Link router that I use, as it's absolute crap.

I went to power it off and on again, and had a brainwave. At my place, I ran three CAT5 cables from the TV area back to the rack, and three from the office back to the rack. At the time, a few people asked why I was messing around with multiple cables (and not just running one, with a switch at the end) and to be honest, I didn't have much of a valid reason. Other than I wanted my Cacti graphs to look pretty for each device.

Now I have a semi-valid reason :)

I run a telephone cable from our kitchen bench down the back of the sofa, along the base of the sliding door and into my router, which sits below the TV. Or used to. I relocated it to the rack, and instead patched the telephone line into an RJ45 wall socket. At the rack-end, I patch another phone lead into the matching socket, and plug that into the router. The router then connects into my switch, as normal.

What this means is that:

• I can keep my router in the rack, which is where it is meant to be.

• I can now have a phone in my office too. All I'll need to do is put a line splitter along the section that connects my router to the socket in the wall. I'll then feed the newly split end into another port in the wall (that links back to the office). At the office end, I have a line filter between a handset and the wall socket.
• If I want to get really smart, I'll plug an Asterisk-compatable PCI card into my Sun box (which runs Debian) and go VOIP. This would mean that I could knock out the need for the answering machine, and could have cool things like a computer voice saying "press 1 to leave a message for Matt, press 2 to leave a message for Maggie." If you were calling from my mobile, you might have other menu options, or if you were calling from St. Brigid's you might not get the bit about me living there. Of course, the message would be stored as a WAV/MP3 and emailed to our desktops. We could probably even have the system route the call out over the internet to Steve's Asterisk server, and on to our mobiles. I could have other commands hooked into the system, secured by a PIN, which would allow remote-access to devices in my house - call ahead and turn the airconditioner on (with the assistance of an IR transmitter plugged into the Qube in the living room). I could have the system call me if certain conditions were met, like say for example Prime had stopped responding (but the rest of the internet was "up"). Maybe that's going too far, but it definately would be possible, and interesting to mess around with.

I was quite chuffed at these ideas. Roll on the Christmas break!

Alternatively, I could look at picking up some telecoms switching gear of eBay? :)

I installed Ubuntu on my Thinkpad last night.

So far, I've had some issues with it locking up completely when I leave it for a period. I think it might have to do with ACPI vs. APM, which worked fine under Debian but gives PCI errors on bootup with Ubuntu.

It's GNOME 2.8 which I had under Sarge, and the wireless is only half working. I can see networks with Kismet but it doesn't want to associate. That might be something else though, not the laptop.

I made some progress with Bluetooth - I can load the firmware for the dongle (I love that word) but it crashes out elsewhere. I think it's a USB 2.0 vs 1.1 issue.

Even with these troubles, I'll be keeping it.

Edit: 21/12/2004 - 12:55AM
The wireless is the router: rebooting it lets me connect now, with a 64bit WEP key. I am sure i used 128 before...

Edit: 21/12/2004 - 12:57AM
I can now use 128bit WEP :) Good ol' power-cycle fixed the router. This firmware is actually not too stable. Might try out some more over the Christmas break.

Radford and I get screwed each year with our birthdays (and I it's never gonna change :) falling close to Christmas/New Years (or on in my case) so we're lucky this year that we have a few extra days off around that time. the 31st is a Friday, meaning that people will have to work. That night we'll do something no doubt, and there's a big one planned for New Years Day which is the Saturday.

The 2nd of January is a Sunday, and because NYD is a saturday, the Monday is a public holiday. This means you can come to my place and hang around the pool and mix up some BBQ action from around midday on the 2nd. Radford and I are doing the Captain Planet thing and combining our powers to throw a bash together.

More details to follow, maybe.