Hurgh’s Blog

Hi All,

Well we are in New Zealand doing some snow boarding, and having a great time.
We have only been here 2 days so far, and only done boarding for one of those days (the first day was spent getting to NZ and Queens Town).

I have uploaded some of our first pictures for you all to look at, and there will be more to come soon.

I am happy to report that there has been no injuries yet, and we plan on keeping it that way.

Here are some of the photos that we have taken so far, and as I said before, I will be adding more later, along with another post.

The snow over here is awesome, it is the last month in their season, and they still have over 100cm of cover over the 3 mountains that we will be going to. One of these even has over 200cm cover.

The runs are longer than most on Mt Buller and Mt Hotham back in Vic, and have less people on them (could be the time of the year that we are here), and there is no cost for parking on the mountain either!!

Well that is all from me for now, I will add another post with pictures later on.

-Hurgh-

I came across a game called GPokr today. It is a poker game built with the Google Web Toolkit for Java. Nathan Weinberg says, “Very good game, very well designed. You can do everything you’d expect in an online poker game (except bet real world money).”
I have had a quick look at it and it looks very impressive. Well worth a look for anyone who likes Texas Holden poker.

For anyone who is interested, GPoker was written by Ryan Dewsbury.

Like most people, I have a few Gmail accounts. I use these accounts mainly for signing up to mailing lists, and also when I need to enter my email address in an online form.

I logged into the main one I use the other day, and found that the filters were not working properly, there were hundreds of emails from mailing lists in the Inbox, and not in their correct labels.

The reason for this, as I found out later, was because some people send the emails with the mailing list’s email address in the “CC” field, and as you all probably know, Gmail filters do not have a section for CC.

I set out to fix this, and after a bit of messing around with the filters, I found that you could use the “Has the Words” field, and enter a string such as:

cc:(someone@list.com)

The above code, simply searches for someone@list.com in the “CC” field, you can also insert:

to:()
subject:()
from:()

which mimic the already available fields.

There is a few other things you can do in the “Has the Words” field, which make using the to:() from:() and subject:() commands useful.

Instead of using the To/From/Subject fields, you can enter something like this into the “Has the Words” field:

to:(someone@there.com) OR cc:(someone@there.com)

which will, as you have probably already guessed, match any emails that have someone@there.com in either the To or the CC fields, which can be very useful for those mailing lists, where some people have the mailing list email address in the TO field, and some people have the mailing list email address in the CC field.

You can also use other operators, OR, AND, NOT, etc, and create big long filters like:

(to:(someone@there.com) AND cc:(someoneelse@nowhere.com)) OR (to:(someoneelse@nowhere.com) AND cc:(someone@there.com)) AND NOT subject:(That Place)

which will simply match all emails where the To and CC are someone@there.com and someoneelse@nowhere.com in either order, and the subject is not “That Place”.

I am still seeing if there is other things you can filter on, like email headers or other things, so I will post another update when I find more info. If you know of other things that you can filter on, please post a comment, and I will add them to the main post.

I hope this has been helpful to some of you. I know it helped me out and now my Gmail Inbox is a lot cleaner then it has been in a while. (Now to find a way to mark all messages as read, like 10000 at a time…..)

-Hurgh-

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Was reading the news at Overclockers and they had a cool link to a game of chess.

The thing that made me interested in this game of chess is that, you played against a computer, but when it was the computers turn, you would see all the moves that the computer was calculating while trying to work out the best move to make.

You can check it out Here.

Even if you don’t play chess or cant remember the rules, it is still worth checking out.

-Hurgh-

Ok, so I am a long time user of Mozilla Firefox, and I must say, I really like it as a browser. Sure there is some things that it doesn’t do, that IE does (mainly ActiveX stuff), but it does all the stuff that I need it to do.
There is one problem that I find is really annoying. Firefox 1.5 (the version that I use) has a bad memory leak. If I leave Firefox open overnight or over the weekend (which I do all the time), normally with only 5-6 tabs open, when I come back the next day, Firefox is using up ~200-300mb of RAM and the same VM.

A couple of days ago, i stumbled across this post: Firefox 3.0 Improves Memory Management and finally I thought that this was the answers to the memory problem in Firefox 1.5!! The article states that he had never had Firefox 3 consume more than 70mb of memory with 10 tabs open. I thought this was great news, so I quickly downloaded the alpha release, and installed it.

My first thoughts were great, the interface had changed a little, it had a few extra little features, one of which is automatic spell checking in text boxes (which is very useful for me), and after using it for a day, I was beginning to agree with the other blog poster. I had not seen the memory usage for Firefox 3 go above about 56mb!!

I then went home for the night…. When I got to work this morning, the computer was extremely slow, so I opened up Task Manager… Guess what I found….

Firefox was using up 380mb of RAM and about 1gig of VM!!!

Now, I did not get a screen cap of Firefox open with TaskManager to prove that it is Firefox 3, but trust me it is. I only had 8 tabs open in Firefox and had left it open over night, no more than 14 hours.

I will probably still continue to use Firefox 3, as I really like the improvements in the interface etc, and I do realise that it is only alpha software, but I really hope that the next version fixes this annoying memory leak.

-Hurgh-

Ok, so a few of you might have already seen this, so just stay with me for a sec. I got an email the other day with a video attached. The video was of this ventriloquist on the TV show America’s Got Talent, and he did a “Real Life Godzilla” act. It was very funny and I wanted to see more, so after a bit of searching, I found the second show.

For those of you that haven’t seen it yet, here is the first one:

Real Life Godzilla Part 1

This is also a bit longer than the one that was attached to an email, so if you only saw the one from the email, go check this one out.
At the end of the first one, the Judges say that they want him to come back, so here is the 2nd part:

Real Life Godzilla Part 2

The guy is very talented, would be such a cool party trick to be able to do that sort of stuff well.

Anyway, Till next time.

-Hurgh-

It’s been a long time since I last posted, so I hope to catch up a bit here, and try (notice i said try) to keep this a bit more alive.

Probably the main reason that I have not posted in a while (over a month…) is cause I am lazy… But there has been other reasons also .

I have started a new business, actually it is my first business too, so that is a bit exciting. I will say more about it later on, but for now, the main purpose it has been started is to help some friends out with web and email hosting. When I finally get the site up and running, I will post a link and you can all go check it out, but in the mean time, if you have any questions, leave a comment and I will get back to you by email.

Working out all the different things needed to do to get the business up and running, etc, has taken up most of my time recently. It is not hard to set it all up, just takes a lot of time, patients, and a lot of waiting on the government… It has been a good experience for me though, and I have learnt a lot out of it.

Starting my own business has been a goal of mine for a long time, I have always wanted to do it, so it is awesome that it has finally worked out. For now though, it is just a little business on the side, I still work full time, and plan on doing that for a long time, as I am really enjoying what I am up to at the moment.

There is more to say but I have other things to do, so I will post again soon (this week).

-Hurgh-

Yes, I have been busy (sorta). I have been doing lots of work on a few different projects and have neglected the Blog.

My RC Chopper is nearly all back up and running. It is at least all put together, just need to do some tunning and it will be all ready for a test flight . I am sorry but I have not taken any photos of it yet. I will see what I can do about that in the next few days.

Another project I have been working on is my new Fileserver. It is now complete and is starting to store lots of my data. The server has 5×200gig HDD’s in Raid 5 (total of about 800gig) and 2×40gig drives in Raid 1. The raid 1 array is for the system files and any other little programs that I want to run on the server, and the Raid 5 array is all for storage.
I have also used LVM so I am able to add new HDD’s and extend the size of the LVM with little effort, so the 800gig can grow when I need it to, without the need to move all the data or split it.

That brings me to another project that I have now started. I purchased a Negative Scanner so that I was able to scan in my old photos and also my Wedding photos. I have now started that thanks to the Fileserver being finished. One of the driving forces behind building the fileserver was to make a place that I could store all the photo’s that I scan. The wedding photos will be scanned at the highest res which produces a 109mb TIFF file.

That is all I have for now, so till next time.

-Hurgh-

I know, I havent posted anything recently. I have been away so have not had time.

I thought I would make a short post jsut quickly, letting anyone that cares know that www.ausgamers.com was hacked lastnight.

You can check out an image of the hacked site here.

Nothing too exciting, but the site is still down at the moment, so looks like they are trying to recover from a backup.

More posts later, I have started re-building my RC Chopper, so might post some pictures of that too

Quick update too about my last post (Busy Weekend). The time for the team that we supported was ammended, and now they came 2nd in the mixed teams, and 13th overall, with a final time of 15 hours and 31 min (i think). For some reason though, these have not been updated on the Oxfam website.

-Hurgh-

I took Friday off last weekend to be the support crew for one of the teams running the Oxfam Trailwalker. For those of you who dont know what the Oxfam Trailwalker is, it is a 100km walk from Jells Park Conference Centre in Wheelers Hill, to the summit of Mt Donna Buang. Despite the name, there is a lot of teams that actually run it, and I was supporting one of those teams.

The team that I was supporting was called “Team DWAC” (representing the Southport Health Club). They did really well, finishing 5th in the Mixed Teams (listing here), and 22nd overall. The final time was 17 hrs : 21 min.

It was a bit disappointing as when the team made it to Checkpoint 7 (the last checkpoint before the finish), they were told that the conditions up the side of the mountain were too bad, and that they were not allowed to continue. This was really hard for them considering they had just run for 88km and were told that they were unable to complete the run. The track was re-opened the next morning, so they were able to finish the last stage of the race, but it was not the same as they had to stop for a night in-between.

Whatever the case, I think they did a great job and I know I would not have been able to do as well as they did.

It was a great day, had a lot of fun, and I will probably do it again next year (probably supporting my wife who wants to run in it next year ).

-Hurgh-