Well, I'm housesitting for my mother for six weeks while she's off gallivanting around Europe. She doesn't have broadband. TelstraSaturnClearParadiseNetlink phone, so no ADSL, and cable installation isn't too cheap if you only want to use it for a month-and-a-half.

So I called Whoosh. I've got LOS to Mt. Vic, surely that's good for something? Apparently, it isn't. Whoosh only works in the Wellington CBD. "It's not line-of-sight", the call-centre denizen I spoke to said. So I will be stuck with dialup. Damn. And they're wondering why they're not getting wonderful uptake in Wellington?

The School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences has a new website, with at least two pictures of me on every page, and a new name: The School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, although the blackboard in CO339 contains several alternative suggestions:

• Students must swim Cook Strait
• Surely Most Students Can Study
• Statistics Makes Studying Completely Superfluous
• Seeking More Students, Currency, and Status
• Statistics Makes Students Cry Softly
• Stato-Mathocistic School of Computer Science
• ...

Proteus, an IM client for Mac OS X now uses libgaim. But libgaim is GPLed. And Proteus most certainly ain't.

What's the solution? IMServices, "The Core of Proteus". Yes, the Proteus guy wants to use GPL code, but doesn't want to GPL Proteus itself, so he's written some sort of RPC-accessible daemon to link with libgaim, and has the audacity to say "...best of all, it's [IMServices] open source".

IMHO, that stinks. It may (and I say may -- MySQL's lawyers wouldn't agree) be legal, but it's still cheating. I'd previously considered registering Proteus, but I'm certainly not going to do so now. Adium looks nice enough, anyway, also uses libgaim, and is GPLed.

Literally, "Stamped Mice".

The sticker on the top of the box says:

Ingredients: Sugar, Aniseed, Wheatstarch, Glucose Syrup, Flavours, Colourings Carmines 120 and Indigotine 132 Importer: John Jacobson Ltd, 107 Hutt Park Road, Lower Hutt (oh, and "Powdered Aniseed")

...and it's back!

It looks so small, and yet so large, and it feels so heavy; and the 1024x768 screen feels cramped. Maybe I did like that powerbook, just a bit; the extra 128 pixels of screen width really did help. I think Chris is right: all laptops suck.

Well, this blog is now running on quirm.sitharus.com, a shiny 2GHz Celeron in ValueWeb's data centre.

I'll shift the rest of the stuff off lancre later.

Well, admittedly they only want to antivirus and firewall software on people who buy new computers with OSes, but as someone who for the first time ever bought a new computer with an OS this year, that would affect me. And all the antivirus software in the world won't help when it stops updating after a year because you haven't paid whatever subscription fee McAfee or Symantec wants.

That, and if I'm forced to run NetNanny, something they also seem to support, I'll, er, just have to break the law :-)

It seems that if things get annoying enough MagnumMac will loan you a powerbook while they're fixing your other laptop. It's only a G4 667 15", but apart from being wider (physically, and by 127 pixels) it's the same depth as the 12" iBook, and thinner. Same disk (30GB) and less RAM (512MB). No internal bluetooth, but it does have PCMCIA. And no visible gap at the front under the battery.

Still, maybe my iBook will be deemed a lost cause and I'll get a replacement. Unlikely, though. But I can hope :-)

Well. Took my iBook down to a different Apple Authorised Thingy yesterday - digerati (was Econet). But they said that as the fault was likely to be MagnumMac's doing, they couldn't claim for it under warranty. So I took the iBook back to MagnumMac, the people who at the last repair fixed the internal microphone and broke the wireless. The guy at the service desk wasn't too helpful - suggested I might have to bring down the AP that it was having difficulty with - this is one of the SWANS APs at VUW, built out of an old powermac with PCI Prism2 card and the Linux HostAP drivers.

But I got a call from someone else at MM this morning, asking if I wanted to have another laptop on loan while I didn't have my iBook. So I'll be using a PowerBook for a few days. And hopefully they'll have sorted out whatever problems there were. Which would be nice.

Well. That was an exciting week.

Two papers submitted - workshop and demo extended abstract - for OOPSLA.

Now I am trying, with somewhat limited success, to catch up on sleep.

Oh, and PDF2you now works on OS X.