i guess you know you’re a child of the internet age when before calling a mate you havent seen in a while. you check to see if he has a blog and what/when the latest post was. Much to my delight I found that Mike, one of my cluey-computer-literate mates has finally started to blog for real. As can be seen from my lack of updating I am more of a reader than a writer, and as you can see from my earlier posts when i start i can find it really hard to stop so i end up writing a lot without saying much.

A condensed version of the last 7 months.

December

• Worked
• Got a girl.

January

• Worked

February

• Worked
• Psuedo started new role at work - Software Configuration Engineer or something. I look after the regen machines, a couple of qa/licencing web apps, a bit of product installation and stuff and code a bit.

March

• Worked

April

• Worked

May

• Turned 24. old.
• Interviewed with Microsoft in Sydney. Even though I screwed it, the interview didn’t live up to the hype. Anti-climax. Got a flight. Didn’t get a job.
• Worked.

June

• Worked
• Batman Begins. omfg.
• 6 months with Shell.
• Found out what the next year at work will hold. yay.
• GoogleEarth. coolest app i’ve seen all year.it makes you feel like one of those spies in the movies with control of your own personal surveilance satellite.

July

• Played poker - won 10$, left early. Should’ve stayed and cleaned my bosses out.
• Realised i hadn’t blogged in a while so decided to do a quick update, which with my record should probably see you through till christmas.
• Added my first two trackbacks. I don’t really know what they are or what they do. hope they don’t offend my one or two viewerd. oh well.

Well it’s the race that stops a nation tomorrow Australia’s very own Melbourne cup. It is also some as close to a national hat day as we will ever get, not that hat days are important and every country should have one, but for some reason the piece of clothing that defines Melbourne Cup day is a hat. It doesn’t matter if you hat is made from silk inter woven with silver, gold, titanium and space dust threads and encrusted with diamonds and depleted uranim or if it is simply an empty beer carton or indeed a grocery box turned upside down and placed on your cranium. Mine is or was going to be one of the latter. But i don’t think i can be bothred right now it might have to wait till 11:30am tomorrow, after i’ve forgotten about it and put it off. Oh yeah you might be interested to know that in the sweeps at work, i pulled Zazzman who’s odds are currently sitting at 126:1. I find myself feeling torn between hoping that all the other horses and/or jockeys somehow have all have concurrent non-fatal hear attacks that leave them helpless and not moving for as long as it takes Zazzman to trot the 3.2 kms to the finish line, and hoping that Zazzman has been faking all the bookies out and will in fact stride home easily to take the cup home to wherever he wanders from. I’m going to bed.,

I had an interesting (read frustrating) day at work today. We are in the process of consolodating some of our servers, we got a new duel 2.6ghz xeon’s with raid’d scsi and a chunk of ram - i don’t remember the specs but it’s pretty fast and it’s going to be our new sql server. The old box that used to serve both sql and web was also a duel spec’d machine albeit a slower one, that ran 2000 server and iis 5.0, this box’s new lease of life is that of a dedicated http server. Both machines will be running 2003 server. So that’s the background to this little adventure.

Last friday I began a test migration of our old webapp to a test setup of IIS 6.0 that is temporarily living on the new sql server. The web app is a mixture of mostly stock standard asp but there are also a couple of .net components and a couple of straight forward perl scripts (more about these two PITA’s later). ASP pages aren’t enabled by default in IIS 6.0 so the first thing I had to do was enable the ASP server extension. The server extensions node in the IIS manager appears to be a new management concept to control centrally what extensions are supported by the web server, things such as server-side-includes, asp.net support CGI program support, ISAPI support and the rest - much like the AddModule/AddHandler stuff in Apache. I think this is a good idea, though, I was a bit dissapointed that the server extensions weren’t obviously configurable on a website by website basis. That was the first part of getting my ASP pages working. The second part involved editing the metabase.xml file (located at %WINDIR%/System32/inetsvr/metabase.xml) and setting the AspEnableParentPath attribute to TRUE. This is because a lot of the ASP I had written included different asp modules from relative parent directories (i.e. they used ../[../]* in their paths). Again this is a property that is disabled by default for security reasons and is generally not needed when using the more recent asp.net technologies. So after enabling ASP and setting up my Data Source to point to the current DB the majority of the web app was up and running and after setting the connection string to use for the asp.net components so too were they. By now it was about 4:30pm and time for a beer.

Well the weekend flew past and this morning it was time to send the email to the PTB (powers that be) informing them of the pending downtime and movement, it was also time that I checked to make sure that my perl scripts were working properly and this my friends is where the “fun” and frustration begins. So after reading the documentation that came with ActiveState perl 5.8.4 I was wrongly hoping that my perl scripts would just-work™. How wrong I was it took me a day to figure out and in the end was caused by two simple yet frustrating changes in the behaviour of CGI in IIS 5.0 and IIS 6.0, with no help i might add from the error message spat to the browser by IIS or from IIS’s log entries. Basically the error that i saw looked something like this (this is from memory so it is quite possible it is not entirely accurate):

So, it appears that my scripts had not only become deliquents during their transfer but were also not returning any errors. Well I thought that was a bit strange so I went and had a look at the log files for the requests (it’s amazing how many ctrl-F5’s you’ll do just to see if it works this time around) and all they had to tell me was that the server returned a HTTP 502 error. Not the HTTP 200 OK that I so desired. Taken from msdn: HTTP 502 is the error code for a Bad Gateway and the description is The server, while acting as a gateway or proxy, received an invalid response from the upstream server it accessed in attempting to fulfill the request. Hrmm.

So I realise that when it says upstream server (particularly wrt CGI) it is talking about the program that is called by the http server to generate the content to return, but it still didn’t make particularly a lot of sense to me. But moving right along, I hacked up a little test hello world perl script and it looked like this:

print “Content-type: text/htmlnn";
print “hellohello";

and by god it worked! (note: both scripts ran as they should when they were run from the command line). I"m going to paraphrase my day and skip to a shorter (but still long winded) description of the problem and the solution. So I try and add one of my perl modules that i use in the production scripts to my little tester and WHAM! i get that educative error message shown above, I thought thats a little wierd the modules work just fine when ran from the command line - whats changed? My first thought was that in the security upgrades to IIS 6.0 and server 2003 that they’d somehow overridden or replaced the open function used by cgi programs such that they were unable to use relative directories, so I replaced the relative directories that I was adding to the @INC array with absolute directories and wahla the script worked more than it did two minutes before. They still weren’t working as the should though.
My scripts grab some data from the database put it in a temporary file and then process the tempory file, they use a temporary file as both a cache of the data (it doesn’t change once it’s entered in the database) and so that they can pass the data to third party apps before they do some further processing. The problem was that these files weren’t being created!? WTF they’re being created when I run the script from the command line so again, what problem is IIS having. So for some reason I decided to find out what the current working directory was that the script was running in. It took me a few looks but then it clicked, the script was being run from a directory different to what I was expecting, and thats why the relative paths weren’t working but the absolute paths were and it’s also why the temporary files weren’t being created.

Here’s what I think happens when executing cgi IIS 5.0 compared with IIS 6.0. Say a request is made for /foo/bar.pl (maps to c:webappfoobar.pl). Now, IIS5.0 appears to changes directory to c:webappfoo and then executes the equivalent of perl bar.pl. So the current working directory is c:webappfoo and any relative path is relative to this directory. IIS6.0 on the other hand appears to stay in the root directory of the web app (in this case /, which maps to c:webapp) and executes the equivalent of perl foo/bar.pl. It’s this difference that was causing me a lot of my headaches but not all of them. I’ll talk about the second problem I had tomorrow. Sorry for taking so long to talk about so little.

Today I took a trip to Verona, the land of Romeo and Juliet, alas I was less one Juliet for the journey. I left Ezio’s house at about 10 I think and made my way to Dolo train station from where I probably could have gone straight to Verona but I wasn’t completely sure of that so i took a train to Venice-Merste (the main venice train station that is on the mainland-the other one is on the island)and caught an InterCity train up there. It took probably about an hour and a half.

Once I got there the first thing i needed to do was pick up a map, because I had no idea where i was going. The day was pretty basic actually, I walked to the Arena where they have outdoor opera, it was like a mini-collesium(sp?) except with seats and a stage. Judging by the props they had sitting around outside I’d say that even an opera would be quite enjoyable - for a little bit at least. After that I took off on foot for Shakespear’s Juliette’s apartment. I didn’t go into it but went into the courtyard and took a photo of the balcony and of the courtyard walls, which were chokkas full of about 3.358 billion couples that had visited and declared their love on the walls. After that I went for abit of a walk to a market and bought some tasty fruit thing, taking a couple of pics and then heading back via an internet cafe to have lunch at a cafe surrounding the piazza of the arena. was quite expensive, the surprise of which was the pint of coke costing almost as much as my toasted ham,cheese and tomato roll. Cost me about 15 bucks AU but its not too bad as i’ve been spending way under what I budgetted, which is good cos it might mean i can travel again sooner than i expect. Then i went back to the station waited around for about an hour before boarding a train bound for home, and here i am typing this up. Going to go out for a pizza in a minute when Ezio gets back from work, my buy of course i figure it’s the least i can do for him putting me up. can’t believe i’ve only got two more nights here before heading to rome for three nights and then home. It is all going way to fast for my liking. Going back to work is going to suck lots.

Went in to Venice on monday the 8th to meet up with Carolina, Doug and Mernush. I was running late as I had to ride a bike 4km to the train station, whih was fine, except for when i took the wrong turn and went left a street too early and so missed my train. But as fortune would have it they all missed their bus as well and we arrived at Venice SL within about 10 minutes of each other. The first stop on the list was the island of Murano - the famous glass place, we caught the number 42 water bus over and had a free short tour of one of the glass making places was a little interesting and the room was very hot, that lasted about 5 minutes so like i said, it was short. the girls wanted to get some ash trays and some gifts for their mum’s, I also succumbed and bought a vase for mum although I’m not entirely sure it is hand made as it was kind of cheap and all the really nice handmade stuff is really expensive. Although the other guys had done venice island the day before they showed me around, and by showing me around, I mean walk until we get lost and then keep walking until we find somewhere we recognise. First stop was the famous San Marco square, we got there about 11am I guess. This is a huge square that you get to feed the pigeons in but this time around the pigeons were either not very hungry or had a thing against australians, as the few birds that were eating weren’t eating from my hand, but Doug and Carolina were doing alright. I wanted to buy them a coffee but then Mernush told me how a single coffee was something stupid like 20 australian dollars, so i passed. We went and got lost again while we were looking for somewhere to grab some lunch-it’s more fun than it sounds. Once we found lunch we walked around abit took a few photo’s looked at some more trinket shops as Carolina still had some ashtrays to buy. At around 3:30 we said good bye to Doug and Mernush as they had to go and check in to a new hostel closer to the airport as they were flying up to Stockholm this morning.

I spent the afternoon with Carolina, first thing we did was go and find these italian good fortune necklace things, that the other three had bought earlier, but i still wanted one. Once we’d found that shop we’d both bought everything we needed and so had the afternoon to waste. And we wasted it in good fashion, I think we walked around lost for about 3 of the 4 hours, it was good we got some coffee and a really big cup of icecream. So at about 7:30 we found ourselves at the train station cos I had to catch a train back to Dola (the station near where I’m staying). the next train left at about 8:10. We just sat out the front until I had to go, Carolina had to go back to her campsite. She was spending a few hours in Venice today, before heading off to the airport for the night as she heads to Barcelona for a few days before flying home to Tampa.

All up I think this was the most fun day I’ve had while I’ve been away, seeing things and having people to talk to about them is a much better way of experiencing sites than only by yourself. It also makes your photo’s a little bit more personal than a tour of the architecture of whatever town you’re in. I think my photo’s are going to have to wait until i get home before i attach any to any posts - Ive taken about 260 at the moment. Thank the lord for digital cameras!

It’s currently friday and i’m being kicked out of my hotel as it is time to move on to the next place, a hostel/camping ground thing about 25minutes by train away from florence. So i thought it was maybe time to update the record.

The conference started today with the keynote speaker being leslie lamport from microsoft research talking about his fail-safe consensus algorithm known as paxos - he is quite a good speaker and while i followed most of it there were a few ideas that I didn’t quite get the reasons for. The first session that I attended was about inter-discipline stuff and they had a psychologist from the UK talking about how we (humans) make decisions.
Then we had lunch I sat with a guy from a university in canada who is going to be lecturing at ucla from next semester, and the other person i can remember was a professor from some italian university.
After lunch I went to a session on Security Attacks, most of the presenters were from Carnegie Mellon Uni (CMU) - It was appeared a bit dodgy as the most of the people that asked questions appeared to also be from CMU. ONe of the presenters looked a bit like Stan Lee of comic book fame. And for the almost final session on Tuesday I went to a panel called “Industry Perspectives on Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks", it was kind of interesting with a number of the panelists from some big european telco’s - the discussion ranged from all the technical problems to social and political (things like privacy and policy). Finaly I went to some more presentations on ad hoc networks basically i just wanted to see what a guy from MIT was like in the flesh.

That night I and a few others Varun(India), Alexey(USA/Russia) and Enrique(Spain) went to the galleria de academia to see the one and only david and whats more it was free! A nice tourist guide lady gave me the hot tip that on tuesday night the gallery was open for free. Free is good. Then we went for a walk and grabbed a bite to eat. I went home past the Dublin pub where I had a few beers and then went back to my hotel.

Wen to an irish pub for a few beers to help with putting me to sleep last night called the fiddlers elbow, behind santa maria nouvella - was actually alright but this is just for my memory so on with what i did today.

OK, so today i did the churches. i spent a bit of time ginning around this morning trying to buy a razor and then some shaving cream, and then tried to get a sim card for my mobile but the place was shut when it was supposed to be open? Then i went and registered for the conference and got my bag, its quite a nice laptop backpack so now i’m going to have to go and buy a laptop to use it. It also contained the conference proceedings which I was thinking would be a modest you know 50 -100 pages or something, how does 1000 plus pages sounds, its a freakin’ phonebook. My paper is on page 975 i think. Then i went for a walk and tried to go see the statue of david but the galleria de academia was closed today, i’m going to go tomorrow night when it is free! woo!
Then I kept walking and made my way to the Duomo, the third largest church in the world, the thing is 110 metres long, had a good look inside took a lot of pictures can’t remember what of though - I’ll post some when i get the chance. Went for a walk up to the top of the dome - there is afantastic murel on it of like hell and heaven and stuff, so heaven is at the top of the dome and then all around the bottom are pictures of people falling into hell and being made to work hard - and then in between you have these little devils and angels holding things that look like clothes dryers. After that I grabbed a bit to eat and headed off to Santa Croce another famouse francescian church and museum. The famous thing about this place is the tombs and memorials that it holds, tombs for michaelangelo and a pseudo-tomb for galileo. It also contains art by Donatello and michelangelo himself as well as a whole lot of other famous peeople.
After the church I paid a visit to the local australian theme pub, apperantly all the australian pub is made up of is XXXX flags and stuff, XXXX was the only australian beer they had on tap, so I had a carlsberg.

I continued my journey across and along the river to pointe veccio - I wasn’t too impressed with it, just a bridge with shops selling jewellery. On the way home I ran into a couple of piazzas and took aquick look. Then I spent another half hour looking for this internet place that i went to yesterday. And now I have to go and get ready for the welcome ceremony thing that they’re having for the conference.

Still haven’t really slept, I think I might have got an hour or so on the flight over from Hong Kong, which took forever by the way 12 hours of shit movies that I’d either already seen on the previous flight or had just seen before. Didn’t really feel like reading either, well at least not until about half an hour before we were set to land - I’m reading a book called ‘Digital Fortress’ by Dan Brown i think, it’s the guy who wrote da vinci code at any rate. It’s been pretty easy reading so far, but i think i am going to type for ever on anything.

OK, so back to the story. Got into Roma at about 6:12 am - Taxi’d for ages. Rome airport is fucking massive as well. Customs was no worries from getting off the bus from the plane to a cafe on the outside with my bags took about 20 minutes. Caught the train into Rome Statzione terminale or something that took probably 45 minutes to an hour or something - cost 9.50e. Then sorted out a ticket to Florence and caught that train at 9:30 cost 8e for the booking fee. Found my hotel pretty easily as it’s just around the corner from the traino, checked into my room - it is pretty small which isn’t bad and the “ensuite” (notice the quotes) is quite funny, i have photo’s and i’ll upload them when i can. The shitter even has an electric chopperupperer - it is seriously like a porta ensuite has been placed in one corner of the room. The guys that work there seem pretty nice.

I didn’t think it would be a good idea to take a nap as I’m trying to get my body clock into the groove so I think i might have an early night and get up and do something tomorrow. I’ve been for a bit of a walk - tourists everywhere and I just heard there are a lot of people from perth around and i’ve started to wear my wallabies cap so maybe i’ll bump into a few of them around and convince some of them to come and have a beer with me sometime. Actually another quick story/observation - i think there were quite a few conference goers on the train - the guy across from me was reviewing a paper when I sat down, though he quickly put it away when I asked him if he was going to DSN which wasw kind of wierd and I noticed later that some guy from Berkeley was sitting on the other side of the aisle from us with his family. Needless to say I didn’t talk to either of them. I hope the conference is more friendly - I’d really like to meet some of the smart people that will be attending, and hopefully make some contacts that might come in handy in the future. If not now.

My talk is on Wednesday, still haven’t been able to contact my folks - I bought a phone card but I can’t work it out. I follow the instructions and then when i try to call australia it fucks up and says something that i can’t understand.

Well, I survived the first leg of my trip no worries and am now sitting at a bar at Hong Kong Airport typing on a internet access point with a reallydodgy space bar. I arrived hereabout an hour ago. THis place is massive - it has65+ gates and in the next 4 hours, 42 planes leaveto 24 separate locations (don’t ask i’m bored and yes i did count both of those figures from the tvscreen things). The departurearea is huge,with a whole range ofstores. someseem so ofthe brands are so expensive i haven’theard of them. i.e. Coach-New York, an outletfor t bustickets in new york?i think not, it’s a bag store. It’s like 5$HK to every $AU so whileyou feel rich,you’renot really. A pint of carlsberg set me back $7 aust,which isabout standardi think. i haven’t had much of a look in anyof the shops. I still have 2 hours 10 minutes to gin around with. imight go and see if anything tickles my fancy.btw they have candy stores here in the departure lounge that are stupidly full of teeth rotting goodness. oh well - i think i’ve had my share of this terminal and i found out that the wallabies trumped the english in great fashion much to my relief. I took some photo’s of the trip so far,i’ll post them when i find a computer with a usb port thati can use.

Well, seeing as I’ve gone to all the trouble of setting this stuff up I guess it’s time to start using it. So maybe a little bit of background.

The reason that I set this site up is because I’m going to Italy for a couple of weeks and I wanted somewhere to post journal entries and the occasional photo that can be shared, kind of like the whole bulk-email-thing-whilst-travelling arrangement that most travellers seem to enjoy, except mostly on a larger scale. I’m also thinking of posting the bulk-email-whilst-travelling (bewt from now on) that I do send to friends just so that I have a record of my correspondence, now whether or not I’ll make all of them public well we’ll just have to wait and see.

I went back to uni today to do a practice presentation for the talk that I’m giving in Florence next Wednesday at dsn , it went alright gave me a bit to think about but generally was a good idea seeing that I hadn’t looked at the paper since we submitted it last December, so I was a little bit rusty. Luckily only 3 members of the mobile ad-hoc group at uwa showed up, so it was pretty relaxed. I still seemed to fuck some of it up, there were a few tangents and a bit of babbling, but i saw a few nodding heads which was a good sign….I think. Whilst at I was at my old stomping ground I also picked up my plane tickets - I haven’t been away overseas by myself before and it’s starting to get exciting. There’ll be much more on this after I leave this Saturday@12:20 - give me a wave. Then I went back to work (after the 2 hour extended lunch break became 3) and learnt a bit about geo-statistics, block models and kriging – all the reasons why I quit GIS a couple of years ago. Funny that.

I think that’ll do for now, I have to work tomorrow, only two days left, and then it’s game on.

Hiho, I just installed wordpress and am in the midst of configuring it.

Nothing to see here…yet.