Some Brisbane Guy

Part of being an Australian means you need to accept that sometimes, an expression or offhand turn of phrase you hear a lot won’t make much sense if you think about it logically. That’s mostly OK because in my experience, people use phrases and clichés they don’t understand without thinking twice; the phrase takes on almost the status of a single word and has a generally understood meaning — and sometimes that’s just…enough, you know?

Here would be a good place to give my statement some solid reinforcement with a few concrete examples of such, but it’s late at night and this blog is hardly a showpiece of academia so I’ll leave the filling of the aforementioned gaps as an exercise for the reader. As you are a constituent of my readership I am certain that it is just to bestow upon you the qualities of resourcefulness, zeal for truth and thirst for knowledge so this burden will be of little imposition to you. And you could start here.

But, to carry on, the point of this post is to say that Guam (see #5) is quite close to me really, being only a few thousand kilometres away and not tens of thousands, like, say, Greece or England.

So what? Well it gets crazy when a conversation goes something like the following:

Me: Hey, what’s up? [obviously imagine me looking way cool at this point]
Other Person: Oh man I just went to a sporting event, it was neato.
Me: Oh yeah? Like, where was it?
Other Person: Dude it was in like, Guam! Took us an hour to get there.
Me: Gee I sure am suitably impressed. Way to go, casual acquaintance! See ya round hey.
Other Person: Ace! See ya.

You can see where the possible confusion could arise where this conversation takes place between two residents of Australia. Guam is being used here as a token to exemplify an exaggeratedly far away location to place special emphasis on the sporting event’s location being very distant. In a place such as the U.S.A. or the Isle of Mann this is fine and congruent with the speaker’s meaning, especially since Guam has indeed been a far-flung outpost of the United States since World War II with its U.S. military base bristling with weapons I imagine to be poised to cause the mass destruction of South East Asia.

N.B. All of the above text is to justify the images contained within this post.

The Buzzword

Like any good buzzword (say…agile — or is that AGILE? No, it isn’t.), Web 2.0 is overused and bastardised to mean a thousand different things by some groups of people, and at the same time it’s mocked and dismissed as just another buzzword by others.

OK so it’s March 2008 and Web 2.0 is so not cool these days because it’s so old, but I feel like it’s important that I share two insightful resources that really do describe Web 2.0, if not succinctly then at least fairly comprehensively

The Resources

The first thing I want to share, and probably the canonical Web 2.0 description, is Tim O’Reilly’s essay “What Is Web 2.0 - Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software.”

The other thing is this Youtube video that really had an impact on me when I first watched it. I think it does a good job of demonstrating the ideas behind web 2.0, especially for only 4 minutes and 31 seconds. It’s a good, quick conceptual overview of the whole concept.

The “I Kinda Reckon” Bit

So now that we’re talking about the whole web 2.0 concept thing, I’d just like to point out that it is really a lot different to the ideas people had back in the dotcom boom/bust days. Business ideas were much more aligned to the big dollar outlay, build-it-and-they-will-come, broadcast mentality of more traditional media and businesses (although some apparently got it right anyway.)

So everyone threw all that stuff out in favour of lightweight, bootstrapped startups that rely on users contributing, and APIs and interoperability and simplicity and figuring out what the web is and not imposing some model from before.

If you look at it like a giant agile development project, the original dotcom web bubble was our first iteration. We got some features, some stuff worked, some stuff was missing, and we threw some stuff away in the dotcom bust. Maybe Web 2.0 is iteration two — Fred Brooks did say, “build one to throw away.”

The Wrap Up

So as insanely belated as this post is, I really wanted to get these two resources off my chest and out of my private wiki (feel the two-point-ohness) so that y’all can enjoy them. Please do so.

Wow.

It looks like my dreams are finally coming true; Krispy Kreme is opening in Brisbane! They were going gangbusters in Queen Street Mall today at lunchtime, giving away 500 dozen doughnuts and they had a giant Krispy Kreme sandcastle — I don’t know why they had that but it was awesome.

And they had a van and promo chicks and ex footy players (Paul Sironen) and balloons and what not.

I snapped some pics on my phone (see em on Facebook):

There are a few things you need to be able to do before you can be considered a Real Man(tm). Change a flat tyre, scull a pint of beer (if not a yardy), read a map and, most importantly, tie a truckie’s knot.

Until today I was the girliest tier of knots ever. Whenever I tried to tie something to a truck or a ute it looked like I’d gently laid the rope over the load then just rubbed the end of the rope around in my palms until it became knotted like a 5-year old schoolgirl’s hair, and driving to the destination would involve several stops to allow me to repeat the tying process. You can imagine my shame!

Everyone in my family is moving at the moment for one reason or another (including me) and that means shifting stuff around in utes, trucks and trailers. Today one of my jobs was to move a particle board computer desk on a ute from one end of Brisbane to the other (well actually from Pine Rivers to Redlands through Brisbane, but whatever…), with a chair as well and a tarp over the whole lot that we specially bought for this journey in case it rained. It didn’t rain.

I had to stop twice at the side of the freeway to redo my granny knots, they weren’t working at all and I thought the desk and chair were going to end up inside somebody else’s car - via their windscreen. The amount of times I’ve been standing on the side of the freeway being blown off my feet by semi trailer draught winds is ridiculous so it’s really for my own safety that I’ve finally learned how to tie a decent knot.

Finally I pulled off the freeway at the Nudgee exit and parked out the front of the Nudgee Golf Course. I knew the time to dither and hesitate was through and that I just had to bite the bullet and learn this thing. With weary, frustrated fingers I brought up Opera Mini on my phone and Googled for “truckie’s knot”. Before long I’d found the Queensland Mitsubishi 4WD Owners’ Club’s page Get Knotted - Part II which has great pics and instructions for the truckie’s knot, and I diligently followed with newfound enthusiasm for the land of ropes and knots and load-carrying.

I struggled for a little while with the loops and the bights and the cloves and the hitches but it wasn’t long before I had myself a real, live truckie’s knot! I was elated! I felt so manly, I wanted to have beers in a pub while eating pies and fighting big hairy blokes, bleeding and vomiting and drinking more beer and swearing and talking about footy.

Yeah, I’m a real man today.

My Dad and I went with some friends on the 2007 Camp Quality esCarpade rally. We’re still in Tasmania as I write this but we’re heading back on the plane tonight — thank the Lord we don’t have to drive all the way back to Queensland.

The 2007 esCarpade started in Canberra and Dad drove down from Brisbane with Ray and Tracie (they’re from Gympie and supplied the car) in our HZ Holden Kingswood rally car “The Red Baron” with its 202 Holden motor (3.3 litre), Commodore 4-speed gearbox with sticky linkages, flashing orange lights for dirt roads, knobbly dirt tyres and big steel boxes on top for luggage which you need because the boot fills with dust when you’re bashing down gravel roads.

Everything was going great until before the rally had started when on Thursday arvo, 150km out of Canberra the old six cylinder started spewing oil all over the place and making some unhappy noises. They limped into sunny Canberra as gently as they could, where the esCarpade organisers gave them the number of a top bloke named Charlie of Hughes Mechanical, who were also the support team for the “Ours” esCarpade team. This guy was awesome and the lads worked their asses off until late in the night to get a new motor into the old beast and have it running again for scrutineering the next morning!

So the team managed to enter the rally with a new motor and I was airlifted in Friday night so that I could be there for the start of the rally on Saturday morning.

We headed off with Tracie at the wheel and the old Kingy seemed to be running sweet as a nut until we noticed some banging noises underneath the back end, and it started wagging its tail like a dog over any kind of corrugations. Tracie held on through some hairy moments as the car waggled around on the gravel and we started to think something could have been wrong. We stopped for lunch and had a quick look but everything seemed fine, and then it was my turn to drive.

We were pretty convinced something was pretty messed up under the back of the car as it tried to swap ends any time the road got bumpy and it was scaring the crap out of all of us, and embarassing us too as pretty much every other car in the rally flew past us and we were eating their dust. So we stopped and jacked up the car and we didn’t even have to take of a wheel to notice that the passenger side shock absorber was just hanging around and had snapped at the top where it mounts to the chassis. That explained a few things…

So once again the car was limping to Canberra after every car parts shop in Yass was closed. Repco in Canberra weren’t keen to sell us a pair of shocks over the phone by credit card and they were going to close before we got there, but some desperation, harassment and cajoling eventually convinced Brian to take our credit card over the phone and leave our package of salvation out the back behind a rubbish bin. Then it was Charlie to the rescue again, he put the car on his hoist and had the shocks changed in literally ten minutes and we were driving on with smiles on our dials.

Heaps and heaps more stuff happened on the trip with plenty of cars having mechanical dramas, navigational problems and driving indiscretions, but it was heaps and heaps of fun and in total all the cars raised over $917,000, which was nearly two hundred thousand more than 2006. A top effort.

So now the plan is to build up a car of our own, get some sponsorship and go again next year. Should be awesome.

Today Christian, Groovy (a Holden fan), Milli, scruffy little fella Matt, Patsy and Shannon came to see Anna Weatherup’s Sunday Sesh at The Beach House in Brisbane (cnr Albert and Elizabeth St, above Starbucks and McDonalds) — every week at 4pm btw!

Was a great way to spend a Sunday arvo with a few drinks (not alcoholic for me because I’m off it for 30 days!) and having a chat, Anna’s really talented and entertaining.

How does this relate to rotating a video clip on Mac OSX? I’m glad you asked.

Well, I had my cheap and cheerful digital camera with me and I took a video of the last 30 seconds of Anna cracking out Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”. As you can see I have uploaded the video to Youtube for your viewing pleasure, but my plan came unstuck when I realised that I had recorded the video with my camera on end (you might call this “portrait” mode), and this meant that the video would be sideways on Youtube when it was uploaded. Not good.

I opened up iMovie HD with the plan of just rotating the video there, exporting it and uploading the clip to Youtube, job done. But no. iMovie HD as it comes with OSX 10.4 doesn’t rotate video — it only has every other effect known to man, but nothing that you actually need, like being able to rotate a clip.

My usual googling around didn’t turn up too much useful stuff at first as I found things like Apple’s Final Cut Pro and QuickTime Pro — well they cost money and I’m a tightarse so I don’t really want to be dropping cash on software just to rotate a single thirty-second video by 90 degrees. So I persevered and then I found a couple of interesting links, the first of which was an iMovie plugin called Simple Rotate. I downloaded Simple Rotate and I’m sure it’s good but I didn’t use it because I then found MPEG Streamclip, an awesome but not very intuitive thing that can export to a zillion formats and even rotates, crops, resizes and a bunch more stuffs. So I imported my QuickTime MOV (that’s what Kodak cameras save videos as) into MPEG Streamclip, then exported as an MPEG4 with AAC audio. I messed around with the cropping settings, set “rotate” to 90 degrees, clicked the “Make MP4″ button and voila! The video file was even smaller than the original so it was quicker to upload to Youtube.

Unfortunately the video I created was a little bit too narrow (because it was created from portrait mode, remember?) so Youtube stretches the clip horizontally, which sucks.

But I don’t want to end this post on a bad note, so in other news, today I went waterskiing! It was with the Brisbane Waterski club where the club members will gladly take you out on the river at Jindalee and help you learn to ski, giving you tips on what you’re doing wrong and, in my case, drive the boat around in circles to come and pick you up after you stack it, again and again. It’s great fun — next week I’ll be standing up for sure. Fingers crossed.

I learned some stuff the other day at work that maybe should be obvious, but it wasn’t obvious to me and so what I’m going to do is start a new blog category named “Stuff I’ve Learned”. The two things in this post could probably also be filed in another category called “Duh” but I haven’t decided yet if that is a good idea — maybe after writing this I will decide.

Well, what have I learned? The first item was about HTML and CSS and really Javascript as well — you might call this “DHTML” but who am I to judge? The second was about SQL Server and how a client (e.g. Query Analyzer or a website) resolves a named instance of a SQL Server.

1. You can hide a DIV element using visibility:hidden; in CSS, and then show one of the child elements of the DIV using Javascript, without modifying the visibility of the DIV. How about that!
   I have a demo HTML page that is similar to our real scenario, having two radio buttons and an image in an invisible DIV. The first radio button makes the DIV visible, which, as you would expect, shows the image that is a child element of the DIV. This is how I thought you would need to do things. The second radio button in the example page shows only the image, without showing the parent DIV element — and it still works! This was unexpected for me because surely an element shouldn’t be shown if it is inside another, invisible element? This works in Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox 2 but I haven’t tried any other browsers.
2. We’ve been setup new SQL Servers at work and maybe to save IP addresses, or maybe to ease administration (DNS entries? Server administration overhead?) load, we are using named SQL Server instances on a single hostname (e.g. BNESQL5000\SQL5000) where BNESQL5000 is the hostname and SQL5000 is the name of the SQL Server instance on the server.

   Now the other afternoon, I could connect fine to the named instance using Query Analyzer, which I had running since that morning. Another dude at work couldn’t connect using Enterprise Manager (ergh, clicking — I’ll do it with SQL cause I’m a Real Programmer). Obviously I was connected and using the server, so it wasn’t a problem with the SQL Server instance itself — it was running fine. So I ran netstat on my PC to see which TCP port I was connected to the SQL Server on. It was port 50433 incidentally, so I said to my Enterprise Manager-using friend, “Try BNESQL5000,50433″ as your SQL hostname, which sneakily connects directly to the named instance without using its name. Well voila, my Enterprise Manager-using friend connected straight up and started hammering out database changes with his clicky mouse like a demon.

   You’re probably wondering, “Omg Glenn, tell me how this named instance and TCP port magic happens!” and that’s great because I am going to tell you. The way it happens is that when you try to connect to a named SQL Server instance your client goes “uhh, the bit before the backslash is a hostname, duhhh, but there’s a backslash so, um, that’s the name of an instance innit?” and so it connects to port 1434 (standard SQL Server port of 1433, plus one) which is where the SQL Server Browser service is listening. There, the client asks the question of “which port is named instance ‘SQL5000′ listening on?” and the SQL Browser replies with port 50433. So then the client goes “BOOYA!” and connects to port 50433 without any complaints or further ado.

   So obviously, the problem was that the SQL Browser service wasn’t running on our server, after it was rebooting or something silly. I smugly informed the DBAs what was going on and they fixed the problem in no time. All was well.

So here ends Lesson One of “Stuff I’ve Learned”, I hope it was informative and sufficiently brief!

As part of my web hosting dealings I agreed to upload one of my (now ex-) clients’ sites to his new webhost. When I first offered I didn’t consider that the normal command-line FTP client (GNU FTP?) doesn’t recursively create subdirectories and stuff, so it was going to be an intensely laborious manual task of creating about fifty billion subdirectories; i.e. not possible.

As I do in these situations I unhesitatingly turned to Google, which came through with the goods in the form of lftp (lftp man page), a command-line FTP client that has a ‘mirror -R’ (reverse mirror) that mirrors your local directory to a remote site. “Oh, bomb, that’s perfect,” I thought to myself, and gleefully found that it was indeed installed on our ancient Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 server.

Well ye olde lftp has some quirks and some foibles, at least for the young player like me. The foible I ran into was that lftp tries to make an SSL connection to the target server if it can. In my case it could indeed connect via SSL, but the SSL certificate wasn’t a “real” proper bought SSL certificate, it was a “fake” self-signed cert and lftp didn’t like that one bit. So it would connect to the remote server without complaining but then when I tried to make it do anything it would just refuse and say cd: Fatal error: SSL connect: self signed certificate.

To get around this I had to edit the config file to disable connecting via SSL. I couldn’t find a command-line option to do this so editing the config file was my only option. This involved adding the line ftp:ssl-allow false to the /etc/lftp.conf file, which probably isn’t ideal since that’s for the entire system but pfft, whatever. You can also create a user-specific config file for lftp in your home directory called ~/.lftp/rc if you don’t have full root access or you don’t want to ruin everyone else’s fun .

After making this change I reconnected to the remote server with the following commands:

lftp -u newsiteusername newsite.example.com
Password:
lftp newsiteusername@newsite.example.com:/> lcd /fake/local/website/directory
lcd ok, local cwd=/fake/local/website/directory
lftp newsiteusername@newsite.example.com:/> cd fake/remote/website/directory
cd ok, cwd=/fake/remote/website/directory
lftp newsiteusername@newsite.example.com:/fake/remote/website/directory> mirror -R

So that was the end of another enthralling adventure in the land of Linux web hosting.

Adding meta tags to your WordPress blog is a fantastic idea and one that I have overlooked until now. But a bit of a nudge from this scruffy little fella woke me up to the lack of meta tags on my blog — it seems like WordPress isn’t into meta tags out of the box, and I wasn’t happy.

Me, googling and coding up my meta tag change!

Matt’s nudge was actually that I should add a meta description tag so that the search engines show an alluring chunk of text beneath my link, instead of the current crap excerpt from that ridiculous post about Brisbane finally getting rain.

So I decided that I need to have my meta description text to be the same as my blog subtitle, known as the “description” to the WordPress application itself. I decided, for now, to go for this:

“Or, 101 ways to improve your social life! And that’s ironclad!”

Who’s not going to click when they read that?

Naturally I was doing a task, so the first step is to google how to do it. I googled for WordPress meta tags and found this Codex article about how to add meta tags to WordPress. It’s pretty easy really. You just need to edit the header.php file of your WordPress theme to include a meta description tag that has the value you want, in my case the text above.

So here’s the code I inserted into the header.php file of my WordPress theme. It uses the bloginfo template tag to display the blog’s description, as you may peruse below:


<meta name="description" content="<?php bloginfo('description'); ?>" />


So, now I just need to wait for the search engines to update their listings and I will be swimming amongst a traffic bonanza. Booya, thanks Matty!

That’s right fans, I’ve finally fixed my RSS feed. I thought it just randomly broke, but it looks like I was stuffing around with a random file that actually gets included in the RSS XML and it broke everything. The end.

In other news I’ve been on holidays and got back, and I have tons of photos.

In still other news, we successfully launched the new Suncorp website this week. It’s a massive site and we built it using ASP.NET and C#, with lots of user controls and master pages to help get us through. We had some server troubles at first but now we’re looking good and the site looks like it’s going to hold up nicely. I’m stoked, because I’ve been working on the project since May and it’s great to see it finally come to fruition.