AusNOG 01

IMG_0889Congratulations are in order for Steve Baxter, David Hughes and James Spenceley for organising the first AusNOG (Australian Network Operators Group) conference. An amazing 150+ people attended the two day conference in Sydney. Let’s hope that they continue.

I was asked to present on IPv6 and my slides are available under Presentations.

2007/08 NBL season is underway

DSC_4587Grant Ward and I went to see the Adelaide 36ers play their first game of the 2007/08 NBL season at the Distinctive Homes Dome against the Wollongong Hawks. Andrew Walton was unfortunately heading for the US so had to miss the game. The 36ers ended up winning the game 108-101.

IPv6 access to the IPv6 survey

I’ve been surprised that there actually are people out there using IPv6 (or at least can reach an IPv6 only web site if they want to 🙂 At last count there were 17 unique IPv6 accesses (and 120 unique IPv4 accesses), one of which was from Telstra access space, to the IPv6 page.

Australian IPv6 Survey

With the Australian IPv6 Summit approaching I thought it might be interesting to investigate if there were Australian organisations that were accessible via IPv6. In particular I was looking for access to their web site, mail delivery and name servers.

If you have IPv6 access you might like to check the results at http://www.mrp.net/IPv6.html

Basketball season is nearly here …

DSC_3987The first preseason games were held at the Distinctive Homes Dome on Friday night. The Adelaide Lightning played the visiting Japan Energy Sunflowers while the Adelaide 36ers played the Cairns Taipans. It’s been a few years since I took the Nikon to the basketball (aside from last years first game in Singapore) and so I was pretty rusty. Lessons learned included use spot metering, up the ISO value and play with the white balance. It would be nice if the upgrades to the Dome included some better lighting.

Lunar Eclipse

DSC_3951Fairly good view of the lunar eclipse tonight from the back veranda. Taken using my Nikon D70 and a 500mm Tamron mirror lens (3s exposure).

More saga with the web site

I received a report that the Phonebook page wasn’t long enough to display all the entries when viewed using Internet Explorer. I was trying to use the “widget” feature in the new version of iWeb but it would seem that using it allowed the browser to select it’s own font to render the list and this combined with the javascript specifying the length of the widget resulted in the bottom part of the list going AWOL. Extending the length didn’t help overly, even after I was pointed at http://browsershots.org. Eventually I ditched the “widget” and added the contents to the web page but I’m not sure that has even fixed the problem with Explorer.

Some of the systems in browsershots also seem to cache pages which makes things difficult. I have been changing the image at the top of the page (now lavender) every time I change the page so I don’t get sucked into thinking the latest change didn’t do anything.

iLife ’08, some good and some bad

iLife08The new iLife arrived today so I thought I would give the new iWeb a spin. While the web widgets seem like a good idea and allow embedding of HTML easily enough the placement and formatting around it needs work.

I am also not so sure that the Photo Albums template is an improvement. It seems like a good idea except I can’t find a way to select the photograph it uses as an index (aside from reordering the photos so the one I want as an index is first) and then the resulting page takes an eternity to load (I only tried from local storage, it may work better from a web server but I find that hard to believe). The slideshow should cope better with photos in portrait format rather than scale them so they are the same height as the landscape ones. Also if you change the background colour then don’t make it white since that will make the captions “disappear”.

There are certainly more knobs to play with but having a preference panel with default values would be a fine idea if you want a consistent site.

Home again

A month away is just the right length of holiday, enough time to relax without going crazy.

Singapore

IMG_0749As is usual I broke my journey home in Singapore. My visit nearly coincided with Singapore’s National Day holiday. Saturday turned out to be a rehearsal for the celebrations and naturally they were centered near where I was staying, around the Marina area. I got to see a few flyovers, especially a Chinook that continually passed over the city. People wanting a Duck Tour would have been disappointed since the water seemed to be out of bounds with the Navy playing with their boats.

Singapore’s answer to the London Eye, Singapore Flyer, is taking shape with one capsule attached. While it is still officially scheduled to be completed in March 2008 there is hope it will be ready for Valentine’s day.