There's one bug that I've wanted to fix for a long long time. I thought I had it once or twice, but didn't. Unfortunately, despite that project being my "main task", I rarely seem to have the time to work on it.

Work
I'm in at work bright and early. I was the first developer in. This is mainly because Ian gave me a lift and usually gets to work before I wake up in the morning.

As it is, I've had to contact everyone who's previously signed the key and ask them to revoke their signature. I'm feeling pretty silly at the moment.

Not many people used my old key, which is good. And AFAIK, none of the e-mail addresses on that key still forward. This is probably good.

For those who care, 0xB1479E55 can be used to communicate with me from now on.

Private health cover
Spent a good chunk of the day comparing various private health insurance packages. The Australian government is going to charge me a big slab of money for earning chunks of cash but not getting private insurance, so I'm hoping to rectify that shortly.

What worries me is how much the government is pushing private health insurance. All Australians are entitled to free public health insurance, called Medicare. Higher income earners pay a Medicare levy to help pay for this, the even higher income earners pay an extra levy if they don't have private insurance.

Recently the government has introduced a 30% government rebate on private health insurance. This, combined with the extra levy that was recently introduced, is a big incentive for the higher-earners to get private insurance. That's all fine with me, but I'm a little worried that it might be the start of a "ramping-down" of public health cover. I don't want to see Australia increase the rift between the medical services available to the rich and the poor.

If you're planning on writing software which I'm going to have to debug, and want to save me a large amount of mental grief, please try to adhere to the following rules:

• Do it properly the first time, instead of marking the code as "broken" and then never coming back to it.
• Follow the relevant written standard, be it a RFC or otherwise.
• Think very hard about what happens in error cases. Even though you might not expect anything to go wrong, it will. Program very defensively.
• Before using a program as part of a critical piece of software, at least take the time to read the man-page.

While not all of the above were a factor in this bug, I've had to fix more than my fair share of bugs caused by them.

Me? I've got to remember that when I do testing to try and use exactly the same environment as the "real thing". A couple of hours could have been saved bug-hunting if I had realised the software I was using for testing had been patched to ignore SIGPIPEs.

Fun
Had a great party last night, with many good friends over. DanielG brought over a beautiful bottle of port, which Jacinta and I now have all to ourselves because everyone else thought it was something other than port. :)

Work (Michelle)
Michelle, our office manager, left for greener pastures yesterday. We gave her our best wishes and farewells at a nearby pub. Michelle had been working at Schoolsnet for a very long time, and has been responsible for many essential processes and proceedures. Her smiles and good nature will be sorely missed. I wish Michelle all the very best in her new career.

Tea
After getting directions from Junwei, I now have a good supply of cyrsantheum (spel?) tea. Yum!

Work (Building Committee)
I've been elected on to the new building committee at work. There's a large amount of politics surrounding this, and I'm rather honoured that my team has decided that I should represent them.

Sofie
Sofie's started at Schoolsnet, and we're working on introducing her to the joys of hackey-sack. Sofie is also a trained masseuse, and I'm very thankful to her for helping me relax after a nasty day of bug-hunting.

Ian
Ian's a sweetie, and I'm glad that he cares about me so much. He's also picking up my (now fixed) television on Monday. What a guy!