Monthly Archive for January, 2009

First Impressions of New Zealand

Published on Friday, January 30, 2009 in New Zealand. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

New Zealand Customs and Immigration is really strict! Even more so than Australia! Before I could be issued a boarding pass for my flight to Auckland I had to produce a paper copy of my return itinerary and show it to the check-in agent. I didn’t have one (I had all the relevant numbers in my head and it was visible on the check-in computer, but The Rules said it had to be paper!) because I’m not returning until March, and I’d probably only lose it anyway, which meant I was in for a quick run around the terminal with my 20kg bag looking for the Emirates office to get a print-out. Luckily the airport bus was early, and even after my morning jog I made the flight with about 20 minutes to spare. Once in New Zealand, everything that came off the plane was x-rayed, sniffed and poked just to make sure it wasn’t food, soil or drugs. The Australians simply asked me if I had any fruit or vegetables then let me go!

Seeing New Zealand from the air, I was surprised by how much it looks like Scotland. Since it was evening when I arrived, I was too tired to go explore Auckland. On my way into the city from the airport the main thing I noticed was how quiet Auckland is when compared with Sydney (or even Melbourne). Auckland is much smaller, but still the largest city in New Zealand. Even around lunchtime there never seems to be the same crush of people that I’d just about become used to in Sydney. It’s quite nice really.

I’m leaving Auckland tomorrow morning and heading North to the Bay of Islands for a few days, before turning back South and eventually getting to Christchurch sometime before the start of March.

I wasn’t sure how I was going to get around New Zealand. Meg suggested I go on a Contiki tour, as she did the same thing a few years ago, but it was quite expensive, and to be honest, I didn’t really like the idea of sitting on a bus for 2 weeks with a load of drunk 18 year-olds!

I’m traveling with Kiwi Experience (the same group as Oz Experience), which has a pretty similar reputation, but in my (Oz) experience wasn’t anywhere nearly as bad as that! I’d also been considering the Stray backpacker bus, as it seems to aimed more toward people who actually want to see the country rather than those who just want to get drunk, but after asking around friends who have been over here already, Kiwi Experience got far more recommendations. I suppose I’ll find out if I made the right choice in a few weeks!

Converting .lit files to PDF for Linux

Published on Saturday, January 24, 2009 in Linux. 5 Comments Tags: , , , .

Rather than carry a load of “dead tree” books with me on my travels, I have a collection of Microsoft Reader (.lit) ebooks on my laptop. The only problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any Linux software available to read them! Fortunately, the software exists to expand MS Reader files to plain HTML, which can then be converted to Postscript and on to PDF, which is most definitely handled by Linux.

The first program required is ConvertLit (slightly dubiously shortened to clit). The source is available, but since I’m running Ubuntu 8.04 on my laptop, I opted to install from the .deb files linked below.

sudo dpkg -i libtommath_0.37-1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i clit_1.8-1_i386.deb

Once ConvertLIT is installed, the process is as below.

clit my_book.lit html/
html2ps html/my_book.html > my_book.ps
ps2pdf my_book.ps my_book.pdf

Although simple, this can be time-consuming and repetitive, especially if you have a lot of files to convert! To deal with this I wrote a short shell script which runs through the process of converting a specified .lit file to PDF.

To use it, download the script and set the permissions to allow execution. I have a ~/bin directory in my $PATH for scripts and small bits of code that I’ve hacked together. It’s not required, but I find it pretty useful.

lit2pdf my_book.lit

My script only handles one file at a time, but something like this can be used to deal with entire directories.

#!/bin/sh

for file in *.lit ; do
lit2pdf "$file"
done

echo "Complete!\n"

Feel free to make changes, pass the script on, etc. It works well enough for my needs, but please let me know if you come up with an improvement. And remember, as the ConvertLIT usage screen says, “Please do not use this program to distribute illegal copies of ebooks. … that would make Baby Jesus sad.“

“Coon & Goon”

Published on Tuesday, January 20, 2009 in Australia. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

The Australians don’t really go for this political correctness lark. To illustrate this, I present a poster for the Scary Canary’s (the Base hostel bar) celebration of Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Brilliant!

For those who don’t know, Coon is a brand of Australian cheese (I still laugh when I see it in the supermarket!), and Goon is disgustingly cheap wine, usually sold in 4 litre bags. Great stuff!

Another Change of Plan

Published on Tuesday, January 20, 2009 in Australia and New Zealand. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

I’ve been back in Sydney for a couple of weeks now, mostly trying to sort out what I’m going to do for the next few months. I was pretty much set until a few days ago when I tried to confirm new dates for my flights back to Aberdeen (via Tokyo).

It seems that my travel agent has sold me an open ticket that isn’t all that open. I can make changes to my flights, but not the changes I actually want to make! For example, Qantas tell me that the Sydney to Tokyo flight on the date I requested is full, but their website tells me that there are plenty of economy seats still available. Aparently these seats are part of a sale, and not available to customers who have already booked, the end result being that I had to cancel the remaining portion of my ticket, and book new flights myself. To say I’m not very happy about that is an understatement.

I’m thinking my travel agent is mostly at fault here, but I can’t help think that Qantas are being a little unreasonable too.

Anyway, I’m now flying to Tokyo from Cairns, which isn’t so bad as I’d planned to head up that way again to do some diving. Hopefully the weather will have cooled a little by the end of March! As a result of all these changes, I’m planning on heading over to New Zealand next week until the beginning of March.

New Zealand was always a bit of an after-thought on this trip. It was somewhere I really wanted to visit, but dependent on whether I had the time and money to do it. I’ve got a rough idea of what I’d like to see, but no real idea about how long it will take to get around. I travelled from Cairns to Sydney in around seven weeks, so hopefully five will be enough for New Zealand.

A practical use for the OS X ’say’ command

Published on Wednesday, January 14, 2009 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Glad to see I’m not the only person to do this!

Goodbye, Geelong!

Published on Tuesday, January 6, 2009 in Australia. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

After almost 3-months, I’m leaving Geelong this afternoon and flying back up to Sydney. I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do once I get there yet, but getting a job is pretty low on the list of priorities at the moment.

I’m flying out to Tokyo at the end of March, and I want to spend some time in New Zealand before I leave, so that only really leaves me with 6-8 weeks in Australia. Even if I found a job tomorrow, I don’t think there would be much point in it!

Instead, I’m planning on heading back up to Magnetic Island to get my SSI Advanced diving certificate, then maybe up to Cairns to dive at the Great Barrier Reef, if I can stand the tropical heat, that is!

Other than that, I’ll most likely just be catching up with the guys that stayed in Sydney. Possibly fly out to Perth to see Martin.

If I can do all that, I’ll have seen more of Australia than a lot of Australians!

Police to step up hacking of home PCs

Published on Monday, January 5, 2009 in Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , .

I’ve just seen this article on The Times website (via Slashdot).

The Times article is pretty sensationalist, and I don’t get the feeling that the Slashdot discussion will be particularly balanced either judging by the ~40 comments that have been posted already, but I still think it’s a terrible idea with regards to privacy.

[Richard Clayton]said the authorities could break into a suspect’s home or office and insert a “key-logging” device into an individual’s computer. This would collect and, if necessary, transmit details of all the suspect’s keystrokes. “It’s just like putting a secret camera in someone’s living room,” he said.

Police might also send an e-mail to a suspect’s computer. The message would include an attachment that contained a virus or “malware”. If the attachment was opened, the remote search facility would be covertly activated. Alternatively, police could park outside a suspect’s home and hack into his or her hard drive using the wireless network.

I’d be interested to know how investigators would deal with someone who’s taken the time to properly secure their gear. Are the police and MI5 sitting on a stack of SSH or WPA2 0-days? Although if they can gain enough physical access to install key-loggers covertly, I don’t suppose a tightly locked-down system is going to do much good anyway.

New Year, New Public Key

Published on Thursday, January 1, 2009 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

A couple of days ago the Ubuntu 8.04 installation on my EEE 701 suffered a nasty file system crash.

I’ve reinstalled from a USB stick and everything seems to work as it did before. The only loss appears to be my GPG private key.

I have a copy of it on a machine at home, but it’s not accessible over the ‘net, so I’ve decided to create a new keypair.

My new public key is on the MIT keyserver (and probably others by now).

Fingerprint: 6F0B A2DC 2CF8 12A1 4695 5A00 A4D0 7E58 8424 7B1B

New Year’s Eve Fireworks

Published on Thursday, January 1, 2009 in Australia. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

New Year’s Eve from around Federation Square, Melbourne.