Yesterday I was sort of curious if I could use my 3 Skypephone in a pinch if I got lost, which here in Sydney, happens quite often. Luckily 3’s Skypephone has both Bluetooth, and supports j2me apps. Mobile GPS unit, here I come. The recipe to get maps on your Skypephone is pretty darn easy. You’ll need one dash bluetooth GPS receiver (I have the Qstarz BT-Q1000), TrekBuddy, a TrekBuddy acceptable map (easily downloadable), and one dab computer – but since you’re reading this, I figure you’ve got that part taken care of.

I’ve been playing around with OSM a little lately, and have been meaning to construct my own slippy map. At first I wanted to do it on my VPS – but with rather limited storage, and even more limited memory, there just isn’t a way. Three problems exists: the first occurs when trying to use osm2pgsql to import the OSM file into the database. Current records state that this typically uses 650+ MB, something my 512MB VPS just doesn’t have (although I’m writing some code that might make this possible in the future).

I’m in the process of working on one of my projects, and the requirement came up to download a fairly large file (4GB). Since I only receive ~20GB/month at my house, I decided to just use my server in the U.S. The next requirement came about needing to compile Mapnik, which I had intended to do on the server at some point anyways, yet I ran into memory constraints. Good old distcc comes to the rescue. I don’t need to use distcc that often, yet when I do, it is very handy. However, I always forget to set g++ to use distcc as well. So, for when I forget next time…

Yesterday we went to Coogee Beach for a BBQ, and I must say, a BBQ in December is pretty nice. Wan, our flatmate, and I visited the store in the early afternoon and bought a case of beer and $50 worth of meat. One of the nice things about the beach is that there are free BBQs to use: just push the button and away you go. After a few hours of eating, we took a short walk to the beach. I was nominated as the designated driver, so I took Wan and one of his friends back to his house to change. Shortly afterward, we were back at the beach and then on our way home.

Status: ❌ I’ve heard that Sydney is one of the most liveable cities in the entire world – a statement I would generally agree with. However. whoever made this statement obviously didn’t drive to work every day. I’ve reached the conclusion that one of the biggest (and only) drawbacks to Sydney, is the traffic. So why is the traffic this bad? I have a few theories. The first theory is that Sydney drivers aren’t particularly cordial. I mean, the road could be ending on the merging lane and drivers still won’t let you in. I’ve literally sat for two blocks in near deadlock traffic with my blinker on, and nobody would let me in. Combine this with the fact that whoever …

Status: ✅ I’ve recently been hired for a company that does consulting for small businesses. Naturally, I haven’t had a huge exposure to SBS. My employer asked me to take the SBS MCP Certification, and this afternoon, I passed. The exam was pretty easy – I think Microsoft basically took the easy questions spread out across the MCSE and dumped them into the SBS exam (some of the questions were very similar). My tips to anybody taking the exam:

First, don’t worry: it wasn’t me. The day began as usual: checking email, calling the United States, and taking care of business. I baked some muffins and scones. To get out of the house, I decided to visit one of the markets on Oxford Street in the city. I love markets. At about 2:00, I left the house and headed down Parramatta Road. An hour later, I had parked on a side street and was walking towards the market. It had more variety than the markets I knew in Taiwan, which often sold many of the same things, and I enjoyed looking around. One food vendor wanted to sell a few remaining kebab sandwiches and lowered the price from $8.50 to $5, so I picked up two.

I have to admit, I’m pretty lazy. I don’t (ironically) like to type, and I really don’t like typing the same command over and over. I found myself switching between my external monitor and laptop quite frequently, and decided to somewhat automate the task. Although I know there are other programs out there that allow this, they either had too many features, or crashed. Xrandr works just fine, but like I said, I’m lazy…

As you can read, I’ve been traveling around quite a bit lately. This means I haven’t been checking the comments on my blog, which means quite a bit of spam has been entered. I am blocking the spam via akismet, however, it is still recorded in the database. Being somebody who hates cluttered desktops, you can imagine how I feel about having a lot (447) of spam. Well, since akismet flips the is_public switch True for good comments and False for bad comments, that makes a really easy query in mysql.

I have several months of back entries to catch up on, but I find the way my “household” operates quite funny: there are three of us, and we sit in an MSN chat room. I used to do something similar when I lived in a huge house in Portland, but it is especially amusing in our two-bedroom apartment. I could even tap out Morse code to my flatmate right now.