The first time we looked at this condo that we ended up buying, I looked at the cupboard under the stairs, and could visualise a small 19 inch rack in the lower part of it, with all of my computer gear in it.

When we got structured cabling installed, I had the CAT-6 cabling terminated onto a basic 19 inch patch panel, with the intent of mounting this in a rack.

Then it became a case of trying to find a rack.

My favourite junk shop, Weird Stuff, didn't have anything that wasn't full height, so I started looking around online.

There's certainly a lot of variance in price. I settled on a 26U Intellinet rack from New Tech, because based on the dimensions on the website, it would fit in the space I had in mind.

When we assembled it, it became obvious that the dimensions quoted were the inside dimensions and not the outside dimensions, and it was about 4 centimetres too tall. In hindsight, I should have figured that out. 26 x 1.75 is 45.5.

This is where I must give a shout out to New Tech. Sarah called them up, explained the situation, and they agreed to take the rack back, and sent us some shipping labels to ship it back.

We managed to find a more simple rack, a 20U Middle Atlantic, which arrived today, and was significantly easier to put together. The only downside: no rear mounting holes. I don't think it'll be a huge problem, though. All I'm planning on mounting in the immediate future are the patch panel, some sort of cable management, a Catalyst switch, and a power strip. At some point in the future, once we stop spending money hand over fist, I'll look at getting a rack mountable server to replace the hodge podge of computers I'm currently running.

What I wish we'd discovered about two days ago, was the Lack Rack. This would have been perfect (and so much cheaper).

I've been sufficiently annoyed by this to try and file a bug against Facebook (we'll see how well that works) and to go to the trouble of documenting the problem as I see it...

I have my blog importing into Facebook as what they call a "note". I figured, I could, so why not? It also gives me spam-free comment support for free (not that I particularly care about comments, people seem to be able to figure out how to email me if they really want to say something to me about a post).

I have a very rudimentary blogging setup. I'm using Blosxom (an old version at that). I hand-write my posts, and the HTML, in Vim. It works for me, and I can't be bothered changing it. Vim is set to wrap lines at 76 characters. I'm writing raw HTML, so sometimes it wraps sooner than it might if I was writing raw text.

The fact that I've got newlines in my HTML source doesn't seem to affect the way my blog is displayed, nor does it seem to mess up in anything else that consumes the RSS feed. Consider this recent post:

There's a newline after "in", there's a newline after "ask".

Here's how it gets mangled by Facebook:

It seems to have correctly ignored the newline characters, except everything else seems to treat the newline as whitespace. Facebook seems to just eat it completely, which mangles the words together.

This phenomenon is not observed in Planet:

Nor in Google Reader:

and of course it looks fine in its native environment:

So I'm really inclined to say that Facebook is doing it wrong. I haven't read an HTML specification yet to try and figure out if how this should be done is specifically codified, but it seems to make the most sense to treat a newline as whitespace - it's being used to break words.

It's a new year, so why not a new hackergotchi I say?

Brandon and Robin came around on Thursday night, and where there's Brandon, there's his camera, so he got a decent enough mugshot to convert into a less crap hackergotchi (after I spent a few hours fighting with the GIMP today)

OMG OMG OMG!!!

I just discovered the connect-a-desk

I had a crazy idea for something exactly like this a couple of years ago, when I was in Las Vegas for Christmas, in a line for a buffet on Christmas Day, and on call. I was trying to juggle a laptop and deal with something I'd been paged about whilst still standing in line.

I'm so buying one. I could work on a treadmill!

I just became aware of this electric lawn mower via Woot!

I never minded mowing the lawn, when it was a decent kind of yard (i.e. level). This mower looks like it'd take the fun to a whole new level: hardly any noise, and no smoke.

I just need a yard now...

I first heard about Jon Oxer's home automation setup when he visited Google last year to give a tech talk (heh, that's right, I introduced him).

After reading this latest article on his house, I've come to realise that he's implementing pretty much every cool thing I wanted to do when I get around to building the "dream house" (except I'm not too keen to go microchipping myself).

The main difference is Jon's actually electronically inclined, whereas I have all the ideas, but lack the ability to go hack them together myself.

So many things I'd like to learn, so little time to learn them...

Got my Linux Fund credit card today. I've been wanting one ever since I moved to the US, but they haven't been accepting applications for a long time.

I don't know how the various credit card companies decide what limit they're going to offer people (beyond credit score). Some companies have given me thousands, others only a few hundred.

I'd sworn off applying for any more cards just for the heck of it, but hey, this one's got Tux on it!

Wanna get on Google Maps/Google Earth?

You can pipe figlet through cowsay?

That is all.

Many, many years ago, I dreamed of making a VCR that had either a serial interface, or an Ethernet interface with a Telnet server. It would have been so useful for those times that I was out and about, and either knew I wouldn't make it home in time to watch a TV show I wasn't already recording, or heard about something on TV during the day that I'd like to record.

Many, many years later, with the installation of the MythTV web interface, I've now achieved that dream. Ah, the feeling of accomplishment!

Oh, and while I'm being geeky, I should mention how I can run a MythTV front end on my laptop, and watch TV in bed with no extra hardware required.

I've reached the pinnacle...

Although Windows' Bluetooth support is a bit weird.

I'm sitting in a hotel room in Canberra, with my old Sony Ericsson HBH-35 Bluetooth headset paired with my laptop, talking to Sarah on her mobile phone, using X-Lite on my laptop, talking to my Asterisk server at home. The call quality is quite acceptable without any QoS.

I should do some maths to work out if the obscene rate the Telstra wireless hot-spot is charging me is less than what it would cost me to use my Australian mobile phone or the hotel phone for the same call.

The next step is to do all of this, but with the iPaq, and on Google Wifi anywhere in Mountain View. Then I'll just have a ridiculously expensive mobile phone.

We are so doing this. Blows away these guys on cost.

I'm already over punching in over thirty numbers to call people back home with the prepaid phone card I've bought, so I did a quick apt-cache search dtmf, happened upon dtmfdial, and in five minutes had a quick and dirty shell script making my laptop do all the button pushing for me. So as to not drive anyone in earshot insane, I just hold the cordless phone's microphone to my headphones.

Of course, if the phone had a speed dial, all this would be unnecessary.

Which File Extension are You?

Not as geeky as some...

The new look Planet Linux Australia is the most spesh looking Planet I've seen to date (not that I've seen that many)

apollock@debian:~$ date -d '13 dec 1976 + 10000 days'
Fri Apr 30 00:00:00 EST 2004

No 10K days party for me :-(

I finally got around to setting up planet.andrew.net.au so I can aggregate all the feeds I read (and ones I haven't been reading) into one place. I have to give big fat kudos to Scott and Jeff for making it so easy to set up.

Now I just need to make it look sexy...

Tragic, but I happened to be running pbuilder about five minutes prior, and noticed all the 9's. As I managed to miss when the epoch ticked over to 1 billion, I had to sit back and watch it roll over to 1100000000.

When I first discovered the Internet, I was a windoze user, and so when I discovered IRC, mIRC was it. So I grew up on mIRC, and never quite managed to adapt to command-line IRC clients like ircII. Well, I could single-task in them fine, but that wasn't how I was used to using IRC.

Whenever I was on a machine with a GUI, I'd generally use XChat, and didn't feel too much like a fish out of water. Problem is, I rarely use a GUI. I usually SSH into the box that is my gateway, reattach screen, in which I have a screen for Mutt, a screen for micq, and a screen for bashing away at a shell prompt.

So the net result of all this is I don't IRC much any more. People who know me know that I tend to flit in and out, depending on if I'm after someone, or some information. I wouldn't mind changing that, and having an idle IRC session in another screen, but till now, I haven't found the IRC client to make it worth my while.

Today, I discovered irssi, and it might just be that IRC client. At least for a start, it didn't bugger up my terminal, the way ircII invariably seems to. The main issue I have is I feel totally uncoordinated in it at the moment. I can split the screen into windows, which is half the battle, I'd like to be able follow a couple of channels at once. It's totally bizarre trying to get my head around what happens when you split the screen, join a channel and then part. It seems to close the "window" resulting in your splits going to hell. The other issue is colours. I haven't mastered how to customise that yet, and the doco is, well, light on in places. So if you run into me on IRC in the next little while, please be patient, while I figure out how the heck to drive my IRC client.

AJ said he had good Google Juice, but jeez, he only added my blog to his blogroll on the weekend, and now my blog is the first hit when you Google for my name...

Boggle.