Was not so spectacular. After dragging myself out of bed at 6am in the morning to watch the hot air ballooning down at Old Parliament House, it was announced that the ballooning event had been cancelled for the day.

It was a huge disappointment as I had been looking forward to the event all week, and the weather was perfect with completely clear sky’s and very little wind. I did manage to get a nice picture of Old Parliament House pre-dawn though so it wasn’t a complete washout.

Old Parliament House

Sphagnum Bog Water

Mmmm…. sphagnum bog water

Stock Quote 2.0

KDE 4.2 has been released, and I thought I should bring out an update to the stock plasmoid. I have done alot of work to make it more usable, and still have plenty of ideas to implement.

The main changes for this release are:

• Data engine backend
• Dockable in panel
• Improved theme
• Improved percent display
• Clickable stocks link to yahoo finance
• Position/resize bug fixes
• Supports stock with commas in description
• Supports kde 4.2

Stock Quote 2.0 is downloadable from kde-look.org.

No I haven’t dropped of the face of the earth, my life has just been boring recently, so I haven’t bothered posting anything :S Unfortunately this post will pretty boring to most people, especially those gnome fanboys.

KDE 4 now provides plasmoids, which are along the same lines as widget in Mac OSX, or those things in Vista that no-one ever uses. The current offerings are pretty slim, so I decided to rework an existing financial stock quote plasmoid to make it more usable. Overall writing the plasmoid is pretty much like writing any other Qt application.

Here is the final product, it can be downloaded from kdelook:

Stock Quote v1.1

Unfortunately, due to our move from Melbourne to Canberra, we had to leave our beloved Woolly Bush Christmas tree behind. After hunting around Canberra for a replacement, we eventually gave up and purchased the “Spiky Christmas Tree” below.
It has been named the “Spiky Christmas Tree” (not its botanical name as far as I can tell), due to the extremely spiky leaves it has which are quite painful to the touch. One benefit of this, is that the cats stayed well away from it, unlike last year where we found many the gnawed branch in the new year

Spikey Xmas Tree

The Perth Royal Show has always been a favourite destination for Holly and I, where we get to act like kids again and run rampant around the show eating lollies, and patting the farm animals. So when the Royal Melbourne Show arrived (20-30th September), we couldn’t resist and had to attend.

So I took the Friday off as annual leave (under the assumption that the show would be quiet as the school holidays hadn’t started yet), and hopped onto the train heading over to the show grounds.

The highlight of the show would have to be the pig racing. Pig racing you say? Don’t worry, I have never heard of it before but I have been told that it’s a common event at the show. We headed over to the pig stadium to check things out and the result? The most hilarious thing I have seen in my life! Check out the action shots below:

Running Pigs

Jumping Pigs

Next onto the farm animal shed. First stop was the ewe birthing station. We waiting around for about 30 minutes for the birth, however the lamb was a no show. I wasn’t too fussed about this because I’m sure the birthing of a lamb wouldn’t be the most attractive thing, so we decided to move on to the baby animal playpen. We followed some kids in pretending we were their parents, but once in, we ditched the charade and ran havoc. How can anyone resist patting a goat or a lamb? After checking out all the baby animals, we scraped the manure off the bottom of our shoes, and went to look at the dog display.

Lamb

Now Holly and I aren’t doggy people, but we fell in love with the Short Hair German Pointers. We stood at the sideline and got to pat them all as they left the arena. Below is a picture of the Schnauzers.

Funny Dogs

Other than that, the day was spent filling up on samples of chips, cheese, chocolate, ice cream, jam, fudge, candy and nuts. So which is better, the Perth or the Melbourne Royal Show? Well I personally like Perth better. It’s just more chaotic and less refined than the Melbourne show, and to top it off, Perth has the Hot Fresh Crispy Donuts ™ which were surprisingly absent from Melbourne! Overall, a most enjoyable day out.

ANZAC day public holiday was seen as the perfect opportunity to take an extra few days annual leave, and make a road trip out to the famous Great Ocean Road. After perusing the available accommodation in the area, we finally decided somewhere that was central to the main attractions we wanted to see, and ended up in a isolated cabin, with a great view over a valley and then over the sea. And no we didn’t smuggle our cats along, the place was pet friendly!

Felix & Archie

Our first stop was the Otway Treetop Walk, which according to the brochure was the longest and highest treetop walk in the world. Well for 20 bucks each, it’s gonna have to something pretty special. In the end it was great fun, except the swaying at the top of the tower gave me an overwhelming feeling of wanting to yak, so we didn’t stay up there very long (just enough to get a quick panoramic).

Treetop Tower

Our next stop was just down the road at the famous triplet falls. We were hesitant to make the walk to the falls (about 1 hour round trip), because of the lack of rainfall in the area meaning everything was quite dry, but we thought it was worth a chance. So after negotiating ourselves down about 300 slippery moss covered steps, we arrived at the bottom of the valley to see the following:

Triplet Falls

Next onto the 12 (8?) apostles. The pile of rubble in the foreground is the latest casualty where the apostle collapsed in 2005. The day was a little smoky so all the photos were washed out in colour, although nothing photoshop can’t fix! Along the way, we checked out all the standard attractions including the Grotto, London Bridge and the Arch all of which are more of the same really.

12 Apostles

So that’s it, another famous Australian tourist destination checked off the list. Now we have to full fill Holly’s childhood dream, and go skiing in the mountains

Earlier this month, the Australian government launched the National Do Not Call Registry. Based on the Do Not Call Register Act 2006, telemarketers are required to check all numbers against the list before they make a call. If they fail to do so, then they could be in breach of the act and face penalties.

Even though this register doesn’t go anywhere near far enough as charities, educational institutions, the government and politicians can still call, at least it’s a start (just watch out for those politicians raising money for some fundamentalist cult).

Everyone head over and sign up and if you get anymore telemarketing calls, don’t just yell abuse and slam the phone down, well still do that but make sure to interogate them first and then file a complaint.

Bogan 1: I hear the Maccas down here is real shit.

Bogan 2: Smells good!

Fractanoid is an experiment in multi threaded programming to allow the processing load to be split across multiple cores in a computer. The image area is first split into 200×200 pixel blocks, each of these blocks is stashed into a list which is being monitored by a series of threads within a threadpool. The blocks are processed and the results signalled back to be displayed.

The image area also always full panning support with new blocks calculated continuously as they appear on the screen. Zooming in and out results in clearing of display and recalculation based on the new zoom level.

Fractanoid 0.1

Through the preferences dialogue, the number of threads can be modified to take advantage of extra CPU’s available in the system. This results in extra threads being added to the thread pool.

Download the source tarball: fractanoid-0.2.tar.bz2

Holly was browsing a cross stitch web site the other day and found this absolutely amazing page.

Exterminate!

I was seriously blown away. I thought that knitting was all about making socks and scarfs. I especially like the mini tardis sitting in the background. Obviously geeks knit too.

Thanks to Shigella for really making me day.

This weekend past marked our first weekend away with a visit to Phillip Island, 90 minutes south of Melbourne. Philip island is well known for the Little Penguins that live there which are located on the western point of the island.

On Friday we made the journey over to see the “March of the Penguins”. Started just after sunset, a series of lights are turned on, and we started to see a few penguins gathering down at the shore. When they form sufficiently large groups (more than 5), they begin their journey up the beach turning and running back to the water if they are spooked.

Little Penguins

Turns out that this time of year is the perfect time to visit as the chicks have just left their nest, and you can see fluffy penguins wandering around calling out for their parents.

Other than penguins, the rest of the weekend was just spent relaxing. We did find this sign post (below) which really made me wonder exactly who creates the little cartoons as this guy must have been smoking something! I was tempted to venture close to the cliff edge to see exactly how accurate the depiction was, however the thought of having the to be airlifted to hospital didn’t quite appeal to me.

Weird Sign Post

Check out more photos of our holiday here.

Today was the day when we decided to see more of Victoria. So being the raspberry fans we are, the Raspberry Fair up near Pheasant Creek seemed a good choice of destinations. Pheasant Creek is roughly 60 mins north of Melbourne up in the Kinglake region.

The main attraction of the day is the “pick your own raspberries” event. Unfortunately due to drought, the berries had ripened earlier than usual resulting in the “slim pickings” sign. We managed to scavenge a few remaining from the vines, however the main entertainment was watching some kid have a temper tantrum because he couldn’t find any and his mother threatening to leave him behind. At this point, we gave up, ate the raspberries we had found (oops, I think we were suppose to pay for them!) and had a raspberry icecream which was delicious.

Slim Pickings

Overall the day was a lot of fun. Air-conditioning in the car would have made it more fun, but that’s the price you have to pay for owning a Barina :S

Woolly Bush

Now we just need everyone to send us presents . . .

iPod on Wood

Who needs friends when you have an iPod. I can stick on my headphones and thus ignore all the wierdo’s on the train.

Here is a list of my favourite podcasts:

• The Science Show
• Ockham’s Razor
• SciPod (New Scientist)
• TWIT (This Week In Tech)