The Outspoken Wookie

Hilton has been operating as a Humanist Chaplain for some time and really likes being able to help people using evidence-based processes. HiltonT has been in the IT industry for quite a while now and was selected by Microsoft as their SBSC PAL in 2008-9, representing Australian SMB IT providers to Microsoft. This Blog is his outlet for his thoughts and feelings about life in general (including the IT industry). Some is good, some is bad, but all in all, its his viewpoint. Enjoy!

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

.NET (dotNET) Redistributables

Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Monday, January 28, 2008

Startup can produce <$1/Gallon Ethanol from biowaste

A friend sent me this link last night.

Interesting. It is the little guys like Coskata who will come up with the most interesting possibilities, more often than not. Sure, they may be sponsored by GM – they have to fund this research somehow – but they are far from a honking big company doing the research themselves with all of the resources that entails. I *am* kind of surprised how little we hear from/about companies that are sponsored by big oil – you hear more like this, sponsored by a car manufacturer, not an oil company.

The car companies don’t care what they use for fuel – a slight engine redesign, and they can go. They don’t care if this fuel can be easily made at home (in whole or in part) nor if it is made at a large site and distributed to outlets and sold to consumers. All they care about is that they are being seen to be proactive in the search for renewable fuels and that they can use these new fuel sources in their new cars. It is the big oil that needs to ensure that your average home owner cannot make their own renewable fuel – to any serious degree whatsoever – or they will lose the massive monopoly they have over personal travel. They will possibly also lose the mass transport markets as well as someone like Brisbane Airport Corporation may be able to dedicate a number of acres to making a fuel source that can refill the planes that land their daily – and that would really hurt the oil companies.

I’d really like to be a fly on the wall in a few board meetings where big oil is talking about the threat that renewable fuel is posing to their place in society. What interest will America show in the Middle East when they can produce at least 100% of their fuel requirements locally? What power over economies can big oil exert when they are almost irrelevant to most of the world? It is interesting.

Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Friday, January 25, 2008

The Aussie Federal Election

Well, it finally looks like the rest of the people in this country agreed with, well, I suppose the rest of the people in this country that Little Johnny Whoward? - the world's most irrelevant political leader - needed a career change. Not only did we tell him that his Party wasn't wanted to run the country, we also told him (well, his electorate told him) that he wasn't wanted to even manage that electorate.

A rather unceremonius dumping of a leader and his party that together had stayed around a little too long past their Use By date and had made some insanely stupid political decisions. I wouldn't like to say good bye, nor farewell, nor see you later, more like take that - and see how you like being treated how you treated the majority of us!

Anyway, we've now ridden ourselves of the ineptitude and plain stupidity of the Mr Sheen Man Party and taken a bow before the LegoMan Party. Let's hope that LegoMan - able to leap tall building blocks in a single step, able to enter a strip club and live to recount the tale, able to eat his own earwax and - YUCK!!! - anyway, let's hope that the LegoMan Party can turn around some of the damage that the Mr Sheen Man Party has done to the country in the past 3-6 years and that the Party Previously Known As The Mr Sheen Man Party can recover from their recent decimation in time to be able to stop the LegoMan Party from making some insane and detrimental decisions which they are bound to start doing in a few elections' time.

The best thing about all this is that were I actually in Brisbane on Sat 24 Nov, 2007, I'd have been working with ABC TV at the BCEC where Mr LegoMan was crowned Lord and Master. However, as I was out of the country at the time (if you count New Zealand as being out of Australia), sitting in a spa in a 5-Star motel in Whitianga, watching the election on NZ television, drinking a beer with the beach out the motel window. I think I had as big a win here as Mr LegoMan - hhmmm, ok, maybe not quite as big a win. :)

Anyway, I had a drink to the change that we needed. I just wonder how long it will be before we need another one?

Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Wow, last post was 24th November?

It seems I've been slacker/busier (take your pick) than I thought. That's 2 months since my last post and I didn't think time flew!

Anyway...

So, what's happened since then? An election, a holiday,the christmas/new year break, a new year, work, life. Hhmmm, so, to recap...

I managed to fly out of Sydney on November 24th, 2007 to an unprepared Auckland International Airport in New Zealand. When I arrived, I had a nice chap ask me if I'd mind placing my carry-on luggage (a Lowepro CompuTrekker AW) on the ground for his Beagle to sniff. No probs... Then he asked me if I had any fruit in there and I told him I didn't, all the while being more interested in collecting my remaining luggage. Then he asked again, because the dog was rather interested in my bag. Then I remembered that when I'd gotten back home from my trip to NSW for a school reunion, I had a pair of bananas in the front pouch that I'd left in there for a couple of days before removing (and turning into banana bread).

Oops. :)

So I explained this to him, told him that he was more than welcome to open the bag, look, smell, feel - whatever he wanted. He did, and was suitably satisfied. He signed my Customs Declaration and I was on my way through to the Customs counter where they then asked me 20 questions about why I was carrying fruit (I'm not) and why I didn't declare it (because I wasn't carrying any) and what else I might be carrying (nothing - are you deaf or stupid) and that not declaring things was a crime (yeah, I'm not dumb, but you're slow to comprehend, mate). Finally they scanned my kit, realised that I was telling the truth (without the aid of an internal body cavity search) and let me go.

So, I picked up the hire car, proceeded to drive 4455 km around the North Island (in 11 days) and boarded the retuen flight home on December 5th, 2007. Customs in Australia seem not to own dogs, nor any will to even ask stupid questions - cayying anything? No. OK, off you go. :)

I got back to one "normal" work day and then a 7AM - 11:30pm day - something I'm more used to - I finished the day off at QPAC working for ABC TV on the "Spirit of Christmas" recording that was aired on christmas night. Tamsyn Carroll (gorgeous) and Jonathon Welch (see his amazing work with the Choir of Hard Knocks) were the stars of the show this year, with Tamsyn back for her second invite.

Then work. Like normal, daily, work work.

Then we had a holiday break. Kind of. This consisted of rebuilding our main server hosting our SBS 2003 R2 virtualized environment and the host it lives on. We looked more closely at MS CRM 4.0 as that is what we'll be making a move to in 2008 so that we can better manage the growth and various projects in our business. I also upgraded the phone system (currently running Asterisk) twice. It is now significantly more stable than it was when running on a Trixbox 2.2.3-1 base with all of the FreePBX and yum updates.

And now it is Australia Day eve - with a few servers and half dozen of so workstation builds almost completely behind us, along with a number of decent automation projects, this has been a good start to the year. It doesn't look like it is going to get any quieter, either, with what we're seeing coming up - and that's a good thing!

We're also currently rebuilding the Real Productions network including a new Studio PC. The old one I built about 4 years ago is still going strong - a Celeron 1.7, 512 MB RAM, PATA HDDs and it handles 40+ tracks plus effects in Cubase SX 2 like a hot knife through butter. It helps when you know how to trim the fat off XP Pro and make it into a lean, mean DAW machine. (Oh, that was appalling!) The Office PC is an old Pentium-II 233 with 384MB and 2 * <4 GB HDDs in it - and this is getting a little too long in the tooth to be usable, which is what's kicked off the rebuild.

The new Studio PC is a Core 2 Quad with 4 GB RAM, supplied with Windows Vista Ultimate x64 OEM and immediately upgraded to Windows XP Pro to make it useful. Running a DAW on Vista is like trying to get to the moon in a canoe with a teaspoon for a propellor. The old Studio PC will be stripped, re-cased and put into the Office. We're also upgrading the ADSL connection and installing an IP PBX (currently running Asterisk) and some IP phones in the studio and office - this will help offset the upgrade cost by reducing the phone bill significantly. All up, it won't be a "cheap" upgrade, but it will most definitely be a significant and cost effective one!

That's enough crapping on for now. More to follow

Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie