Wiki
Sure, I'd heard of wikis before. I knew they've been used successfully for a variety of tasks, and I've been very impressed by the Wikipedia. However I've never before managed a wiki. That's now changed.

On the 5th August I set up a phpwiki for a role-playing game that I was running with nine friends. The wiki was to form a general resource for the gaming group. I imagined it would get some use, with people writing for it here and there.

Since its inception, the wiki has been serving almost 800 pages/day, peaking at over 2000 pages/day only four days after creation, serving 25Mb/day of pages. The wiki size has grown from about a dozen pages up to 161 over the course of a week. Wow, and all this to just ten people. I've been asked to make the wiki public in a read-only format, since many of the players want to share the love.

I've also set up a wiki for business use, being a great place to jot notes, write proceedures, and pass and store information around. I may also end up doing a similar thing for my clients, many of which I'm sure would find such a tool very useful.

Payroll::AU::PAYG
Determine the tax of yourself or your employees in one easy step, using Payroll::AU::PAYG. I'll be talking on this during tomorrow night's Perl Mongers meeting. The entire module was written during my lunchbreak today, although I expect that the talk will take much longer to prepare.

Identity Theft
Lots of identity theft has been going on, and it looks like I'm not the only one who's concerned about it. My bank rang today as a courtesy call to see if I was happy with their service. Oddly enough, they didn't seem at all surprised when I asked for confirmation as to who they where when I was requested for my name, date of birth, and full address. The telephone operator immediately provided name, employee number, office building, manager, team leader, and contact phone number.

Of course, one cannot use the contact number provided by a potential scammer to verify their identity. A call to the bank's customer service department revealed that they could confirm that the call really was them, but only after doing some paperwork of their own to verify it.

A good challenge-response protocol for telephone calls would be great here, to allow both parties to verify the identity of the other. In fact, a good challenge-response system based on sound, cryptographic principals would help remove a lot of identity-theft and identity-confusion. Rather than needing personally identifiable information (name, date-of-birth, address, ABN/TFN/SSN) and static secrets (passwords), being able to provide a cryptographic challenge and response means identity could be confirmed using once-off session information.

Of course, you'd need a way to stop a scammer from presenting you with a challenge that they've received in pretending to be you, but I'm sure there's a way to get around that as well.

Pity the laywers
Been catching up with a few of my friends from University (and High School!) that have gone on to be lawyers. From what they've said, the common belief that all laywers earn a huge amount of money (as compared to say, software engineers or system administrators) seems to be a myth. It looks like they get paid about the same as everybody else.

That which does not kill me, improves my disaster recovery plan
Had a somewhat exhausting experience the other day. After rebuilding a RAID I needed to restore the contents, and discovered a DLT tape which seemed to encounter problems half-way through. It's not very good when your backup that spans three tapes has a problem on tape number two.

Luckily for me, I had a second set of backups which worked fine, and a path of incrementals which means that we would have lost a few hours worth of changes from a non-business period. However, the last incremental tape also encountered problems. Not good at all.

Both problematic tapes were written fairly recently, so it may be that the drive itself is going bad, or it could just be a pair of bad tapes. The tapes also seemed to feel better after 40 hours, so as it happens no data was lost.

The whole ordeal has improved our current disaster recovery plan. More scheduling for testing (although all these tapes tested fine the day before!), and most importantly tagging of unimportant data. The really important data now fits uncompressed into a 15Gb DLT. This will greatly speed restores, improve the chances of data recovery from tape (if it ever comes to that), and allow us to keep more copies of important data to allow restore.

Patentable ideas
We all know of patent #5,443,036 (Method for Exercising a Cat.), which uses a laser pointer to keep your cat fit and healthy. I've recently discovered that the same works equally as well for chickens.

Travel
I'm writing this entry from my hotel room in Sydney, using a wireless keyboard so I can type in a relaxed position, and using a TV set as my monitor. Yes, I'm interstate again, for what I believe is the third time (and fifth course!) in five weeks.

For some reason we're very popular up here in Sydney, much more so than in Melbourne. I don't know if that's because Sydney doesn't have enough Perl people, so everyone's eager to learn the language, or if it's because there are plenty and the local Sydney.PM are doing a good job and spreading the word.

This visit I'm teaching members of one of Australia's larger banks, and they've been a real pleasure to teach. Almost all of them have a good amount of development experience already, so they've been asking questions and absorbing material well. It's very pleasing. The feedback forms are also very pleasing.

On the matter of feedback forms, I find it both ironic and amusing that the most commonly suggested way to improve the first module we teach is to make a two-day course, as that's exactly what we've done. This particular client, however, requested that the more intense single-day version be run, as everyone was quite experienced and would be able to cope. Indeed, they have coped, or at least they have so far. Hopefully they won't blow any synpases after tomorrow's training as well.

Travel Surprise
Getting up to Sydney had its own little surprise. The flight I was catching left from the international terminal in Melbourne, despite being domestic for it's first leg up to Sydney. Flights leaving from the International terminal require a great deal more time to catch than a regular domestic flight -- even though you're only going to be on the plane for an hour, you still need to run the gamut through customs and about 6km worth of duty free shopping that you can't take advantage of.

As fate would have it, I arrived "on time" for my domestic flight, at the domestic terminal, which is after the gates close for "international" flights. So, I was in Melbourne, without a flight, with a course starting the next day that I needed to teach. Troublesome, surely.

Luckily for me, the airlines cover for these situations. It's called gouging. Depending upon how desparate you are, you can either have your ticket moved to the next available flight in the same class (usually about 3-4 days time) for only a modest fee (about 30% of the ticket cost), or they can drop you on the next flight to Sydney in business class for about 250% on top of what you paid for your original ticket.

Of course, everyone else turned up "on time" for their domestic flight in the domestic terminal as well, so there were about 20-30 people all wanting to get to Sydney, I just happened to be near the front of the queue, so I was lucky enough to pay the shockingly high charge to secure one of the six remaining seats to Sydney that evening. I really hope the other passengers weren't in a hurry.

Thoughts on scalping
For a moment I was surprised that we don't have airline ticket scalpers. Almost anyone at the tickets queue at the airport with a grumpy look on their face and two large suitcases is almost definitely in a bad spot. A scalper could easily sell a ticket for three times its original value and still undercut the incredible prices charged by the airlines.

The reason this doesn't happen is the ticket pricing structure. The tickets most suitable for scalping are non-transferrable, or transferrable only with 24 hours notice. The tickets which can be transferred immediately cost even more than it does to catch one of those remaining business class seats, and so they're also a poor investment for the scalper.

Of course, identification is only checked on baggage checkin, so potentially a scalper could check-in someone else's baggage, collect their boarding pass, and then transfer. This is definitely a civil offense, and may even be a criminal one since airlines are involved, both of which are good deterrants to scalpers trying to make a little cash. Plus there's the risk that nobody will want your ticket, and the fact that you can only reasonable scalp one ticket per day per airline.

The upside is that a good scalper could accumulate a great many frequent flyer points.

AD&D
As Daniel's wedding night wish was for me to run an old 1st edition AD&D adventure, I've been moving somewhat towards that goal. I've filled in a few of my missing books with electronic copies (a great money-maker for WOTC), and have been refreshing my knowledge of the rules and adventure.

The old 1st Ed books by Gary Gygax are great to read, especially the whole rant on pole-arms at the end of Unearthed Arcana, or the part of the Dungeon Master's Guide which talks about how swiftly combat can be played out. The then goes through an amazing gamut of rules and exceptions, most of which have been dropped in every game I've played to ensure that combat does move swiftly.

Looking through the old books is rather nostalgic and odd. I started playing AD&D when I was about seven years old, some 19 years ago now. Back in those days (and maybe still today) there was a lot of talk about how AD&D in particular made you evil, or caused you to go into fits of dangerous depression. I still remember being amazed when our primary school principal sanctioned the use of one of the smaller schoolrooms for AD&D play during lunchtimes.

Wedding
Still getting married, and it's still getting closer. Jacinta's wedding dress should hopefully reach us next week, but we've still got a bunch of things to arrange. I'm going to have to check around to see what I can do as far as hand-holding for my clients are concerned while I'm getting married and on honeymoon. Somehow I don't think I want to be SSHing from my palm pilot to fix a misbehaving server while sipping cocktails on a tropical island.

House
With the money currently in accounts receivable (due within 30 days), we will have paid off our home loan. Not bad considering we only got the house three years ago, and one of those years was spent relaxing and earning virtually no money (and definitely no savings).

Goodnight
It's reached my bedtime, so I'm going to grab a few hours sleep before waking early tomorrow, packing my bags, checking out, opening the lab, teaching for eight hours, and then flying back to Melbourne in time to sleep and visit a client the next day. I sure have a busy life, but it's varied and interesting, and satisfying if not exhausting at times.

Credit Report
Invoked the Privacy Act a couple of weeks ago and got a copy of my credit file. The way some spammers push these services, you'd think your file would be filled with sordid details. Instead, it was exceeding dull. This is your name. You've lived there, there, and here. You last know about you working for a company that you left 2-3 years ago. These businesses asked for your credit report on these dates, and that unsurprisingly corresponded with when I was evaluating loans to purchase a house. No other details recorded. Yawn

Work
Busy busy busy. Always busy. Did an upgrade for a client today and one of the drives that arrived was DOA. I hate hard-drives.

Hard-drives
Big box of three hard-drives arrived from Seagate, as part of my previous warranty return. The box contained an almost unbelievable amount of foam-rubber packing.