Short random blog post...

Search dicksmith.co.nz for solder
Sigh.  Yes, Dick Smith doesn't sell solder any more.  

Strange to think that once upon a time Dick Smith Electronics actually bought out David Reid Electronics, another real electronics chain, and then promptly started down the dumbification process which they have now nearly completed.

Thank goodness for Jaycar etc.

Dear People From The Future
Use gtk-theme-switch2 to change from Oxygen-Molecule to some other theme, Oxygen-Molecule caused me  massive CPU usage for Thunderbird and *some* other GTK software.  Oxygen-Molecule-Flat works fine.


So, I made the really stupid mistake of thinking that it was time that I could put off an update of Ubuntu no longer, and set about updating to 11.10.

Now, lets set aside the fact for the moment that once I saw (let alone tried to use) Unity I installed kubuntu-* and switched to KDE after many many years of being a Gnome user (much has been written by others on the rampant stupidity that is the Unity interface).

Anyway, after a lot of messing about, I'm now at a state that I'm happy with, EXCEPT, well, lets look at the screenshot and see if you see a problem [click for bigness] - the ever delightful Traylor Howard is not a problem...


Do you see it?  

That's right. Thunderbird is using massive amounts of CPU, matched or exceeded by Xorg (when Thunderbird is running).  Note that I have taken the screenshot with Thunderbird ONLY on the "select profile", WHAT ON EARTH IS IT DOING?!  

It gets worse if you actually select a profile (even a brand new EMPTY one); it will sit there eating 95-100% of CPU, it works, but when it's not doing anything, it is chewing CPU like a crazy thing.  

Luckily I have 4 cores, but having two of them being effectively run at 100% all the time is NOT conducive to multi tasking.  Not to mention the occasional "pauses" it causes, just locking everything for a second or two.

So far I have found two programs that cause this behaviour.  Thunderbird, and Unison.

Ideas anybody?!

Update 1 

Now for something really interesting, if I maximise the thunderbird window, CPU usage falls right away to normal (0-1%), if I un-maximise it, it shoots back to 100% again.  And it ONLY works if you use the maximize button in the window bar, if you just resize to cover the entire screen, it keeps the 100%, but click the maximize button and it falls to zero!

Update 2

Now that I know it is to do with maximized vs unmaximized windows, my Google search has produced some new fruit... http://robpetti.com/?p=100

Update 3

Update 2 works.  The problem is isolated to the Oxygen-Molecule GTK theme which is supposed to match the KDE Oxygen theme.  The Oxygen-Molecule-Flat theme seems to work fine, as do other "normal" GTK themes.

Hurrah!

So today I filled up my bike at a Shell station, specifically, Shell Blenheim/Curletts road in Christchurch, and after I had paid the usual exorbitant amount for the tank of gas, I got on my bike, put on my helmet, and my gloves, and pressed the starter.  

It didn't start.  

I tried again.

It didn't start.

I turned the lights off (headlight laws and dicky charging systems do not go together well) and tried again.  Still no go.  

I tried some various other things, but long story short, the battery just didn't have enough grunt to spin the engine fast enough to get vacuum going to get fuel to the carb (bike has a vacuum fuel cutoff) and to get it to fire, a jump would probably do it.

So, no problem thinks I, I'm on the forecourt of a service station, I'll just borrow their jump start pack, surely they have one, I mean, it's a service station and I expect people having trouble starting is a common enough occurance after filling up, why wouldn't they have a jump start pack.

Oh, they had one all right...
"you'll have to buy one",  
"but I only want to use one for 10 seconds to start my bike so I can get it home"
"sorry, we only sell them"

Sod that.  So I parked the bike around the back and walked the 4k's home.

Bring back the small garages, the places where the people working there actually know about vehicles, who are helpful, who have even the most basic tools and ability to assist their customers who might need a helping hand after spending thousands of dollars with them over the years.

A new Coke flavour just got released, or at least I just saw it today in P&S.  Coke Zero Vanilla.

Verdict: nice, but not as good as the old Diet Coke with Vanilla.  I miss Diet Coke with Vanilla.  Vanilla Zero is somehow, harder, not as "smooth" tasting as I remember DCwV.

C'mon Coke, bring back DCwV!
 

A long long time ago, I had a couple of BNZ banking accounts, and I also had a BNZ credit card.  Back in the day, the BNZ internet banking was pretty lack-lustre, you couldn't transfer to other people ("Internet Banking Payment" in the modern parlance), and mostly the number of transactions you could view in the reports was only a few months.

Anyway, I closed the normal banking accounts with them long ago and went to Kiwibank who did not suffer any of these issues, but I kept the credit card.  Through a cock-up at the BNZ call center back in the day, they messed up the internet banking on the credit card when they closed the other accounts.  

I had forgotten about those limitations by now, and you'd think that they'd both have been fixed by now, probably at LEAST 5, maybe 8 years later, I mean, at the time the other banks I was using, WESTPAC and Kiwibank both did not have limits on the transaction history.

So today, since I'm procrastinating on my GST return, I decided to pay a visit to BNZ and get the Internet access reinstated on that card so I could download the last 6 months transactions, filter them in a spreadsheet, and enter them as appropriate.

Getting the access added was no trouble, it apparently just needed a password reset.  The guy told me about a special code-sheet card (multi factor authentication) which would be sent out, but I could skip that for the next month.  All good.

I come back home, and after procrastinating some more, login to the BNZ banking and select the date range for transactions, 1/4/2011 to 30/9/2011.  It gives me 2 pages.  Hmm.  You're kidding.  The limitation still exists, it doesn't give me any transactions from before July 2011!  

I try the Export function instead, figuring that at least THAT should give you what you want, right?  NO!  If you want a transaction older than July, you must be crazy, the world obviously didn't exist before July according to the BNZ.  Oh it lets you select 1/4/2011 as the start date, it even tells you it is showing or exporting transactions from that date, but it doesn't actually do it!

BNZ, what, are you running this server on a 30 megabyte MFM hard drive or something?  Is disk space really that limited?  Come on!  Seriously now!

PS: I also found the "Download Statements" link.  Guess what, if you wanted to download a statement from more than 12 months ago, you must be mentally deranged because clearly humanity had not evolved to the point of a banking system before July 2010 at the earliest.  And they are PDFs.  Good luck getting that into a spreadsheet or accounts system without retyping. 

High time I closed out this BNZ nonsense and went with a bank that has internet banking at it's forefront.  One of these days I will stop procrastinating and get around to it.  And my GST.

When Google+ was released, I joined up, I'm not one for social networking, or networking (of the people kind) of any type really, but hey, it was Google and at the time it wasn't full of young beautiful vapid facebook type people, I had vain hope that it might become, to coin a phrase from an ipredict forum thread, "an elite ghetto".

Where am I going with this.  Oh right.  Anyway, I made a couple of posts to my feed or whatever you call it, and I was found by some people who I had worked with in the past and they added me in the first couple of days, I added them back.

After that, I pretty much forgot about it, like I say, not big on the whole putting-your-life-out-there thing, work is more important.

So today, I had to login to my gmail account, which I use just as a "something is borked with my regular mail, try sending from gmail" and hadn't looked at in ages, there were piles, and PILES of messages informing me that so-and-so had added me to their circles.

Looking at my circles, it tells me that 946 people, that's NINE HUNDRED AND FORTY SIX, people have added me to their circles.  Seriously.  946.  And I don't know ANY of them that I can see in a quick face-scan.  Why?!  Why are these people adding me to their circles.  At first I thought "probably a new take on marketing spam or something", but I clicked through to a few profiles, and... they just seem like normal profiles. 

My only assumption is that people are just blithly adding any possible remote suggestion that Google has as for people they might know in some way, and that eventually my name (and by extention eventually every other person on the planet) comes up in that suggestion list.

That is retarded!  Why would people do that.  Not only do they not know me from a bar of soap, but I'M JUST NOT THAT INTERESTING. In fact, I'm not interesting at all!  Think of something really amazingly interesting, and I am the absolute opposite.

I think this is the URL to my profile or something...
https://plus.google.com/u/0/112850805511005419452/posts

Gah.  I just don't get people.
 

I just had to order a new EFTPOS card, my current one lasted just over a year, it is so worn out that the mag stripe is physically worn off in places, right through to the base media, the signature is long gone from the panel, the printing on the back is worn off, and the laminations front and back are starting to peel away too.

Not that I mind particularly, as long as Kiwibank waive the fee, but it is pretty inconvenient not having the card for a few days while they punch out a new one.

I don't carry cash, so I use my card at least once a day, it lives with my other cards, in my pocket.  Those other cards don't get as much use, which is lucky because when my EFTPOS refuses to work I can rely on my credit card to be functional.

So how long do your cards survive people?  Are there any that you have noticed are worse than others in the longevity stakes?

I was the subject of magnificent almost-crash today.  

Against my usually better judgement I decided to take the car out for a spin on a weekend, usually I leave the weekends alone because the roads are covered in half blind Sunday drivers, especially on this particular road.

Anyway, I'm humming along, and come up behind a couple of slow pokes, so like a good driver I check my mirrors, and a head check and look in front, and indicate, and pulled out to overtake them, I'm coming up something just short of 70mph passing the first car, a big land cruiser or something.

Suddenly, holy freaking crap the guy I'm overtaking, who I'm right next to, has decided to swing out into me going to overtake the car in front of him!  

Next few seconds are a bit of a blur, but suffice to say in an effort to not die a painful death there was a lots of tyre smoke, a little sideways driving, and eventually I regained control and got it all pointing the right way again.  I don't think it swapped ends entirely.

If I'd been in that situation on my motorbike, one of two things would have happened, 
  a) I'd have had enough room to carry on
  b) I'd be dead

Once I regained my composure I saw that the other driver looked to have stopped on the road a few hundred meters up.  I considered going to have words with him/her, but decided that discretion was the better part of valour and that my state of mind might not be conducive to cordial discussion, hopefully they got enough of a fright that they won't pull out without having a damn good look in a hurry.

So, drivers, 
CHECK YOUR DAMN BLIND SPOTS!
small low to the ground cars and motorbikes over taking you might be there!

I had noticed that mum's smart drive washing machine was not filling properly, it would eventually give up trying with the trickle it managed and beep.

So today as I was going past and noticed it was stopped I decided to heft it out and check the obvious things, hoses not kinked, water flowing, filters not blocked, give it a whack, that kind of thing, unknowledgable but logical lay-person diagnosis.  So nothing seemed out of place and nothing helped.

Mum happens past and I told her she might have to get an appliance guy in to have a look because I figured there was probably a poked solenoid not opening properly

She says that she already did, last Friday, the guy came in, lifted off the top cover, said something apparently along the lines of "it'll be the control board, too old, don't make them any more, can't fix, that'll be $65".

Ok, so given I thought it was the valve and everything else worked fine, it even tried to fill, I simply didn't believe that.

I jumped on google, and in literally under 3 minutes I had found that on the smart drives, the cold water valve (solenoid) commonly fails, just as I had assumed would be the case.  The post even had a helpful tip on replacing it easily.

As it so happens, I had an old really dead (pump failure from memory, from plenty of years before, never throw anything out!) smart drive (totally different model though) in the shed, so, 2 minutes to take the top off that and pull out the valve, 2 minutes to take the broke one out, and 2 minutes to put it back together.  

Bash bash bosh, one good as new washing machine filling itself happy as larry.

This is not the first time I have encountered lazy good for nothing "repairmen" who think everything can be solved with "replace the control board" and that it's not worth their time to fix even a ridiculously simple and clearly common fault.

If I, a computer programmer, not a washing machine repairs expert, can fix this problem, with just the help of Google, 10 minutes time, and a philips head screw driver, while you can't be bothered, AND charge for the privileged of not being bothered, then you need a jolly good wake up call!

Perhaps I should give them the benefit of the doubt that they knew it was the valve, and also give the benefit of the doubt that these valves are not available, and that this has just got lost in translation, but even if I give that leeway, SURELY for a clearly very common fault on an I'd imagine really common machine (smart drives in general, as I mention, the part is almost certainly identical across a huge range of machines), they'd have a few from disassembled wrecks in their back room.  

Or is it not worth their time to get the apprentice to pull wrecked machines to bits for parts any more.

Update:
Hmm, the replaced valve has also now died.  Possibly just bad luck.  For the moment I've replaced the hot water valve also and hooked cold water feed to it (but still wired as hot, given the valves are apparently different), I think the machine beeps while filling to complain that the water isn't getting hot, but still seems to carry on with the wash.

Update 2:
Ok, apparently even if you use fully hot, it still wants to rinse with cold.  So against advice I have swapped the valves so the hot valve from the old washer is now connected to the cold valve's power.  The valves really do look identical to me, perhaps this is an older machine where they are the same (FWIW, it's a Frigidaire badged machine).  Either way, nothing to loose and it's working so far.

Update 2.1:
As a commenter advised, google got me this...
http://www.angelsnz.net/ZL3SV/misc/F&P%20Service%20manual%20517735.pdf
which indicates that the valves are or at least should be different, with cold being the proportional one, maybe it'll work anyway they are both rated at 12V, and I guess the proportionals work from something less than 12 to 12 but probably only when they need to mix in some cold with 12 being normal operation.  I'll run a multi-meter over them and check resistances against the references in that manual, when I find my multi-meter.

Update 3:
Almost 4 months later, the valve swap (hot valve swapped to cold valve) is still working fine, the valve does drip a tiny bit of water when off perhaps because I guess of the differences between the Hot and Cold valves, but it's not really a problem.

So finally I manage to convince myself that this would be a good time to file my IR3 before the 7th July deadline, after procrastinating for the last couple of months.

Filing an IR3 online now requires using the "Online Services" at IRD (previously you could use a DLN), I used it last year too and it wasn't that bad.  So anyway, I login, not only is there no ability to file because "Information is currently unavailable", but it also tells me that I have no returns due this month.

Somehow I doubt that IRD would accept me not filing based on that though.  So I send them a "Secure Email", the thank you response for that indicates that they "attempt" to reply within 15 days.  FIFTEEN DAYS.  

Gah, maybe I'll try in the middle of the night or something.  Or print out the form.  If that is even still allowed.