Hi Senator Ian Macdonald,

First of all, thanks for your personalized email to me. It’s nice to know that there are senators out there that care. While I agree with some of your points, I would like to ask a question regarding the “Stopping the boats” statement. Can’t we just move New Zealand to be in between us and them. We wouldn’t be stopping them, and gives New Zealand a chance to actually do some work rather than ski, and bungee jump.

I also noticed that the signature on the letter you sent me is quite large, in fact several lines down, and nearly the whole page long. I’ve always wanted to see a senator standing up for the people that want form to have large signature boxes. It’s a great idea, because I usually run out of space writing my name on tax and medicare forms, let alone my signature, which is in fact a picture of a Eskimo, cooking a fish outside his igloo (hence why the small box is annoying!). That aside, I suggest we don’t increase the size of credit cards to fit a signature that size. It would very annoying to find a wallet that size.

I would like to also thank you for inviting me to www.liberal.org.au. I still haven’t got a chance to look at nationals.org.au because I haven’t been invited. Having to be invited to each website makes surfing the internet quite hard.

Regards,
Michael Wheeler

Back in grade 2, I cheated (by accident) in a game of heads down, thumbs up. I would like to say I’m sorry, and I hope that this message gets to you somehow. This memory keeps running through my head, over and over and over again. I will do anything for forgiveness.

Regards,

Michael Wheeler.

Michelle Landry is so bored with this election she feel asleep on the keyboard!

Hi Kirsten,

Thanks for the letter drop. You have beat everyone else to the game in regards to pamphlets, and your views are quite nice. Before I place my vote on election day I would to voice my concerns. My biggest one that I would like to point out, and question you is the left hand section of the pamphlet, about “Helping local organisations”.

At first I thought that the pamphlet was a little folded or on an angle, but upon closer inspection I noticed that it wasn’t a rectangle or a square. My first thoughts was that it was a rhombus, but latter googling and wikipedia research revealed that it was infact a parallelogram. What I would like to know, is why did you choose this shape? It’s far different from every other on the page and looks quite odd. Maybe if it were in the middle it would be better placed.

Another thing I would like cleared up is the placement of the title text. Most humans are taught fairly early to read top down left to right, while your text is placed right bottom. Is this a hint that you will changing our eduction system, and possibly changing English for a language that is read back to front than our norm, or was this an attempt to get votes for people from these nationalities?

Finally, could you please quickly comment on why your pamphlet colour scheme is superior to your competitors.

Kind Regards,
Michael Wheeler

1. Ketch! & HIRO-PON Get It On
2. Dirty Jobs

- Awesome show

3. Andrew Jenks, Room 335

- Really worth the watch

4. How to Become a Hero

-This one too

5. Spicks and Specks
6. The Gruen Transfer
7. ABC News Breakfast

- Beats every other breakfast news

8. Doctor Who
9. Lunch Monkeys
10. Torchwood
11. Robin Hood
12. The Daily Show
13. Colbert Report
14. Good Game
15. Rage
16. Creature Comforts
17. beached az

Auto Negotiation provides an easy way for network engineers to configure ports, allow automatic detection of speed and duplex settings. In an ideal world auto negotiation would be used on both ports, but in some cases (eg, when a network engineer only has access to one of the devices), a network engineer cannot tell if the port is statically set, or set to auto negotiation.

If a port is set statically on one device, and not the other, the auto negotiation process will detect the speed, but no the duplex. By the IEEE standard, if duplex can’t be detected for 10M or 100M then the duplex by default is set to half. Starting at 1G the duplex is set to full.

So what ends up happening is one port set to half duplex, and the other set to full. This causes a duplex mismatch, resulting in a slow link with packet loss. This leaves two simple solutions, set both to a static setting or set both to auto.

This is all well and good, and you end up statically setting the speed and duplex. Duplex is set to full, and 100 on both sides, and suddenly the link won’t come back up. Why is this?

Well on newer switches and devices, a feature called auto mdix allows network engineers to be lazy and use straight through cables where crossover cables are needed and vice versa. Some implementations even allow use of other pairs of wire when cables are damaged.

In Cisco devices when speed and duplex are set, auto mdix is disabled. Therefore if a network engineer has statically set the speed and duplex on one side, and has used the wrong cable, the link will fail.

Long story short…

• Use the right cable types when connecting devices
• Set duplex and speed the same on each device
• If you can’t swap the cable, use auto on both sides
]]> http://michael-wheeler.org/2010/06/30/duplex-speed-and-mdix-and-an-interesting-problem/feed 0 http://michael-wheeler.org/2010/06/26/robot-unicorn-attack-vs-canabalt http://michael-wheeler.org/2010/06/26/robot-unicorn-attack-vs-canabalt#comments Sat, 26 Jun 2010 09:01:23 +0000 Michael Wheeler http://michael-wheeler.org/?p=511

Forget your COD, CSS and Half Life. Two of the worlds best games are free (as in beer) and run on most operating systems. Canabalt and Robot Unicorn Attack. Both require less than three keys to play.

Both are platformers that have the exact aim. Get as far as possible with out falling or running into something. Pretty simple right? You can really get addicted to these and end up spending hours attempting to get to the non existent end.

Canabalt

Canabalt is a pretty straight forward 2D platformer. A guy is trying to escape from something (I’m guessing killer aliens) and takes to the roof top. You can’t stop running, and your only control is jumping. Jump from building to building. Run off the edge – dead, run into a building – dead, run into alien spaceship parts – dead, run into boxes – slowed (which eventually leads to death). Some buildings decide to crumble underneath you. Points are gained by distance traveled.

Keys
x,z – Jump

Robot Unicorn Attack

Like Canabalt, this is a 2D platformer. You are a Robot Unicorn which has some pretty nifty features, Dash and Jump. Your job is to get as far as you can without running into a wall, star, or falling off the edge. Longer you go, the faster you get. Points are earn’t on distance traveled, stars destroyed (using the dash skill).

Now be warned. After 2 hours of playing this game. Looking away from my monitor resulted in the room spinning. Sound is required.

Keys
z – Jump
x – Dash / Rainbow attack

]]> http://michael-wheeler.org/2010/06/26/robot-unicorn-attack-vs-canabalt/feed 0 http://michael-wheeler.org/2010/06/12/pelican-2 http://michael-wheeler.org/2010/06/12/pelican-2#comments Sat, 12 Jun 2010 00:12:17 +0000 Michael Wheeler http://michael-wheeler.org/?p=506
]]> http://michael-wheeler.org/2010/06/12/pelican-2/feed 4 http://michael-wheeler.org/2010/05/22/app-emulationwine-1-1-44-pulse http://michael-wheeler.org/2010/05/22/app-emulationwine-1-1-44-pulse#comments Sat, 22 May 2010 02:48:27 +0000 Michael Wheeler http://michael-wheeler.org/?p=502 Currently the number one use for Wine in Linux is for gamers. I don’t game very often, but it’s fun to play some games here and there, and this time I felt like getting pwnd in Counterstrike Source. It is amazing how far wine as some since 2002. The new steam installs and runs in Wine like a windows app would, and both Portal and CSS worked out of the box. TF2 needed a little tinkering to fix out audio caches, but after that it worked fine. Considering that wine has to take all the DirectX calls and turn them into OpenGL, I am quite impressed with the frame rates, and the best part was I was still running compiz-fusion! Unlike Windows, this allowed me to switch between the game and other apps without tones of redraws.

The only issue I did have was that sounds from Wine took ~2 seconds before I could hear them, making first person shooters fairly hard. Knowing that Wine didn’t have Pulse Audio support I looked around, and sure enough someone had released a patch. Not only did someone release a patch, but it had been added to portage, and just required unmasking.  Apply the use flag and I had sound working at a decent quality.

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