Bugga.NET


BUGGA dot NET – Your home for information on Beer, Cars and IT

  • Fronts – These should be angled down toward the road so that they illuminate the surface of the road and do not reflect into your face/eyes when driving in fog. They do add to the useful visability of a car in all weather and can be used when ever you feel like it.

    Rears – These should ONLY be used when it is foggy and only for as long as there is fog present. The reason that I get infront of you and flick mine on and off is to tell you to turn your’s of you stupid moron. The same reason I gesticulate at you and try and communicate with you. They are a bloody hazard when used when there is no fog.

    Why are rear fogs a hazard when it is not foggy – they are bright, bright things attract the human eye, it takes much concious effort to ignore this extra light source beaming in our eyes as humans causing increased levels of tiredness and delayed reactions for those behind you. It also looks like your brake lights are on constantly meaning that when you do brake it is not always easy to tell that you have started to slow.

    I will give you one polite request for you to cease using your fogs verbally, one impolite should I see you again, on the third time I see you I will follow you home and remove your fog lamp with any object I can think of – probably my tyre iron – please do not take offense to this I am merely trying to help others on the road you can too ONLY USE YOUR REAR FOGS WHEN IT IS FOGGY – THE REST OF THE TIME MAKE SURE THAT THEY ARE OFF!!!!!!

  • Due to being on many forums and being many lazy I do link you to this site.

    How is everyone up for a cruise meet at the BP in Athelstone 10am for a Cruise up Gorge Rd lunch at the pub or takeaway joint or similar then a wander back via a yet to be determined route.

    No excuses – just do it.

    M

    Addendum: Apologies if access to the site before was not working – it seems my ISP had some of thier Cisco’s (LNS’s if you must no) play up rendering my connection dead >< :( M

  • Earlier this month I purchased an i-mate SP3i Mobile phone from Telstra. I have been meaning to do a review, but did not get round to it – so here it is:-

    Features:

    • Windows CE for Smartphones 2003 – Second Edition
    • 32MB RAM
    • 32 MB ROM
    • TI OMAP (Arm) Processor
    • miniSD slot (soon to be filled with a 1GB card)

    The phone itself is actually quite good, excellent reception and clarity even in “dodgy” areas where signal strength is a bit lacking.

    The Tesltra branding of the firmware is ghastly – there is no other word for it and I highly recommend that you upgrade/reinstall the firmware from the imateclub.com site (homepage for imate) if you have one – it fixed an issue I had with optus SIM cards where they would fall off the network after 12-24 hours (actually I only flashed it about 14 hours ago, so more testing is required to see if this is actually fixed).

    iMate support is umm, i cant think of a word that describes how bad it is – its beyond horrific, and for this reason I recommend that if you are looking at the i-mate SP3i that you go for the O2 SmartphoneII instead I hear better things about their support.

    Why a Smartphone? – To be explained in a little bit. ; It runs windows have I gone insane? Probably.

    Why a Smartphone – I wanted a phone that could support PDA functionality, talk to my PC nicely and have a nice accessible format for development. I looked at several PDA/Phone crosses (O2 XDAmini, Palm Treo650) but they all were bigger than I wanted. I looked at Nokia’s but I am not a fan of Symbian for some reason that I cannot define and the developer community does not appear to be as large as for Palm and PocketPC.

    I had been doing some development work for PocketPC at work, and Smartphone is just a subset of that, which should place me in good stead for writing/developing my own apps when I get off my backside.

    There is an application which allows it to be used with the Macintosh platform (which I hope to migrate my home desktop too shortly) and there is active development working on getting PocketPC syncing with Linux systems.

    I decided to risk it on this phone and after some initial dissapointment am fairly happy with it thus far.

    Irritations:
    Missed calls do not show the date nor time of the call – I definatly need to find a replacement for this app.
    Photo’s of people are NOT sync’ed into the outlook feature that supports this – I hear that Windows Mobile 2005 (aka Windows CE for Smartphone 2005) will support this feature (fat lot of good it does me, grrr).

    Honest advice: Wait for 2nd Gen Windows Mobile 2005 based devices to hit the street, probably around March 2006 or even a bit later WM2005 has some nice features and will soon be getting lots of developers but 1st gen Microsoft stuff has a habit of sucking badly.

    M

  • Shocking as it may sound this site was down for about 5 hours today.

    I recently was migrated from a SLOW Telstra DSLAM onto an Internode DSLAM which while being faster – my modems settings were not happy with. After changing from PPPoA-VcMux to PPPoE-LLC as the encapsulation method I got much better stability and speeds, BUT the stupid router deleted all my port forwarding rules rendering the server inaccesible.

    Sorry about that, but all fixed now!

    😀

  • Slashdot | Felony Charges For H.S. Hacking
    Slashdot | Felony Charges For H.S. Hacking

    I cannot believe how broken the American legal system – You have patents that smack innovation on the nose leading to a burocratic slow moving society where nothing can be accomplished.

    You now have minors being brought on on felony charges for screwing around with school computer systems. Now I am by no means suggesting that these children should not be punished, but the punishment HAS to fit the crime. Punishment is also about reformation – a felony in the US is beyond a bad thing and leaves convicted felons with little to no job prospects for the future.

    Its easy to laugh, be rude and criticise the American legal system and way of life, but I hope to hell that our (Australian) society does not adopt the crap that they have. The thin end of the wedge has started – AU-US FTA brought in their patent BS, DMCA BS and other similar crap. Europe have just brought in Software patents. How crappy is that? – VERY!

    🙁

  • My ADSL2+ is now active :

    2005-06-24 04:34:05 EST: 6115 / 850
    Your download speed : 6262436 bps, or 6115 kbps.
    A 764.4 KB/sec transfer rate.
    Your upload speed : 870827 bps, or 850 kbps.

    I’m about 3km from my exchange. Happiness 😀

    I use internode for my ADSL services.

  • To install the Java Development Package (1.5.0.x) I did the following.

    I added multiverse to my repository settings (the following are valid for Internode customers only.

    deb ftp://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu/ hoary main restricted universe multiverse
    deb-src ftp://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu/ hoary main restricted universe multiverse
    deb ftp://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu/ hoary-updates main restricted universe multiverse
    deb-src ftp://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu/ hoary-updates main restricted universe multiverse
    deb ftp://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu/ hoary-security main restricted universe multiverse
    deb-src ftp://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu/ hoary-security main restricted universe multiverse
    deb ftp://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu/ hoary-backports main restricted universe multiverse
    deb-src ftp://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu/ hoary-backports main restricted universe multiverse

    Then apt-get update and install java-package and fakeroot

    apt-get update
    apt-get install java-package fakeroot

    Edit /usr/share/java-package/sun-j2sdk.sh and add the following chunk

    "jdk-1_5_0_04-linux-i586.bin")
    j2se_version=1.5.0+update4
    j2se_expected_min_size=87
    found=true
    ;;

    Visit Sun’s java site and download the latest Java package for Linux (without Netbeans and NOT in RPM format) download the Java Software Development Kit (J SDK) – The version today is 1.5.0 update4 and the rest of this article refers to this version.

    Run the following command (not as root)
    fakeroot make-jpkg jdk-1_5_0_04-linux-i586.bin
    To install the freshly created package
    sudo dpkg -i sun-j2sdk1.5_1.5.0+update04_i386.deb

    As I already had the older J2RE installed I did the following commands – this ensures that existing links for mozilla plugins and runtimes uses the newer java, and are not broken – not clean, but mostly working.
    sudo mv j2re1.5-sun j2re1.5-sun-disabled
    sudo ln -s j2sdk1.5-sun ./j2re1.5-sun

  • Ayres Rock is here.
    I work here
    Iron Knob is almost in high res here
    Wudinna Township is here (mount wudinna is to the north east a little)

  • I am selling a Minitar 802.11b wireless access point here

    and

    AthlonXP 1900+ w/ 512MB RAM, 6xWD 160GB HDD (JB), Antec 480W PSU here

    Have a look, bid and enjoy.

    Proceeds are going to either: fixing my Car (Sunroof or Speakers) or a quieter (and more powerful) server for this site.

    M

  • NeoOffice/J Downloads
    722

    NeoOffice/J has been released for the Mac. From what I understand this is a Mac OS X port of the OpenOffice 1.1.4 product using Java to write the interface. Hopefully this translates into a more “Mac” feeling product.

    If you are in need of an office suite and don’t think Microsoft Office is worth the cash that Microsoft want for it, and that Pages is to DTP’y for you – it certainly cant hurt to check it out.

    M