Author Archive for Rhys

Movember

Published
by
Rhys
on November 3, 2008
in i-think
. 0 Comments

A while ago I shaved off my beard. Now I’m letting some of my facial hair grow back in the form of a Mo for Movember. This lip-tickling effort is about raising awareness (and hopefully money) to help address men’s health issues, especially depression and prostate cancer.

I’m not asking you to turn your head and cough, but you can help by donating. Hell, you can donate online at my Movember page using either credit card or even PayPal. How cool is that? There site is nice and secure and even makes the address bar turn green in Firefox! My internet banking site only recently got on that bandwagon.

Talking about wagons and things that are old and obsolete, seems that even cheques are acceptable! Just write a cheque payable to ‘Movember Foundation’, referencing my Registration Number 1835396 and mail it to:

Movember Foundation
PO Box 292
Prahran VIC 3181

And I haven’t even mentioned the best bit yet. Not only can you give money away while I grow my magnigificent Mo, but you can also give a bit of a smack-down to the tax man. As usual, donations over $2 are tax deductable. It’s a whole world of awesome.

If you are a tight-arse (you know who you are) you can always grow your own Mo and ask others to cough up the dough.

Of course if you do give money (remember you can donate online) it will go towards continuing to raise awareness of men’s health issues through the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia and beyondblue - the national depression initiative. The PCFA and beyondblue will use the funds to fund research and increase support networks for those men who suffer from prostate cancer and depression. You can’t ask for more than that. Well, you can, but it’s probably better than what you would have spent the money on. The wonderful people at Movember (it’s not just a month) have even detailed what they do spend the money on.

I’ll be posting some pictures of my Mo once it starts to properly set in. While you are waiting, why not make a donation?

Mo On!!

Your travel survival plan - Part 2

Published
by
Rhys
on October 11, 2008
in The Mill
. 0 Comments

Moving alert readinessNow that you’ve organised your duress words it is important to consider what actions you want taken when a duress word is received. Finding the right balance between a simple phone call and declaring war against a foreign country can be difficult, but is an important step to get right. Aim too high and your safety line back home may be hesitant to act (in which case you need a better safety line), too low and you may be found too late lying in an icy bathtub sans two kidneys.

The action that you choose to take should take into account the possible situation that you are in. For instance, if you have agreed to call every 30 minutes and miss a call in, phoning back is not a useful safeguard if the battery in your phone has died. For this reason it can be beneficial to split communication methods so as to not allow for a single point of failure. For instance, you may choose to write three blog posts within 24 hours to inform your safety line that you are still alive (for now) and even give away information on your whereabouts (photographs are especially good, doubly if they include Geocodes). Unfortunately this mechanism is susceptible to attack, and could also become unavailable if the country you are visiting happens to ban your website (again a potential single point of failure). You may even be travelling in an area where they don’t have internet access or mobile phone coverage.

Depending on where you are travelling and how much you want to mitigate risk you may need to invest in a good satellite phone (or two), an EPIRB satellite beacon or simply forego the holiday and spend the time in your fallout shelter, shotgun in hand watching the door. You do have a fallout shelter, right?

Better yet, why not utilise the system that has been used throughout time and take a buddy with you. At least then if you both lose your kidneys you get a wonderful shared experience to end your vacation.

Your travel survival plan - Part 1

Published
by
Rhys
on August 10, 2008
in The Mill
. 0 Comments

Recently a close friend travelled to China for many weeks. Whilst I can’t think of a good reason to go to China for pleasure, he certainly has (I have heard something about some little sports competition they have going at the moment).

So, having now “hooked up” with someone he has has to turn back to his friends in Australia to perform a very important duty: “Keeping track of his kidneys”. Unfortunately this plan was enacted too late and didn’t have enough detail to properly react to this scenario. Fortunately he still claimed to have his Kidneys less than 24 hours ago, but I can’t be certain he has them at the time of writing.

Don’t think this is purely limited to the stealing of Kidneys. Other problems you need to keep aware of include:

  • Stealing other organs. Sure, kidneys are the main ones, but you’ve already crossed a line, so why not harvest some other organs while you are at it, such as your liver or corneas.
  • Kidnapping. Even if you don’t have anyone back home willing to fork out for your ransom, you may still be worth something to kidnappers who can send your bodyparts in the place of genuine kidnap victims in order to encourage the ransomee (is that even the right word? If not, it is now) to fork out the dough.
  • Slavery. Don’t underestimate your worth on the slave market.
  • Being accidentally married and thus being financially responsible for your new bride/groom’s entire family

So with all these things that can possibly go wrong who in their right mind would want to even travel overseas? I’ve heard culture and life experience are a couple of reasons.

So that you can continue having life experiences that don’t involve getting you addicted to drugs and becoming someone’s sex slave in their dungeon, you can arrange a plan to communicate your whereabouts and status to the outside world. Depending on the level of the problem, a quick call to the local embassy or a crack team of mercenaries will be ready to assist and extract you from any situation lickety split.

Unfortunately my friend consulted someone else to make these arrangements, who despite their many years of watching violent television and films has not been left as paranoid about how to prevent or deal with these situations as I. It’s important to take life lessons from movies.

The first and most important step is regular communication. How regular will be dependent on where you are going and what sort of access you have to communication equipment. Communication can be either one-way or two-way. If the communication is one-way you need to establish a protocol for verifying the validity of the communique and a plan if the communique is malformed. Most importantly is the need for a duress word. This word needs to be arranged in advance when their is a high degree of certainty that the person is not under duress.
Duress words

The best part about duress words is their ability to add extra meaning to your message. For this reason it is important to have more than one. Using these words you can communicate important information to give an approximate location, description of the problem and even a rough count of how large the team of mercenaries should be.

It is important that the duress words be able to be slotted in with your normal messages without arising suspicion. Poor choices of duress words include “help”, “I’m being kidnapped” and “get me the f@# out of here”.

Because the duress words are supposed to be so normal it is possible that a duress word may accidentally be used in a communique. That’s why it is important to have a procedure to follow when a duress word is received, a communique is late or malformed. Usually this procedure would have varying degrees of action as you increase your state of readiness. You can either use numbers or colours[1] (or a combination of the two) to help make it easy to determine where in the process you might be.

In my next post I’ll describe what steps to take as you move from one alert level to another.


  1. That’s right, colour is spelt with a “u” [back ↩]

Adding WPF Windows to an existing Windows Form Project

Published
by
Rhys
on August 5, 2008
in i-think IT
. 0 Comments

I’ve been recently reading Essential Windows Presentation Foundation (Chris Anderson) and I have been really looking forward to being able to create some funky WPF apps. I’ve almost finished (except for the sudden scope creep) a utility that I’ve been writing using Windows Forms. Like most good utilities it sits in the system tray just waiting to be used.

While using this tool yesterday I realised that I was being driven crazy by its need for interaction by the mouse. So I decided to create a global shortcut key and that would open a little navigation window to help you select the item you wanted (this is just some of the aforementioned scope creep).

I knew straight away that this was a job perfectly suited for WPF. So, I opened up the Add New Item dialog in Visual Studio 2008, selected WPF and was greeted with one solitary option:
Add New Item (WPF)

Unfortunately when you have a Windows Form project, User Control (WPF) is the only choice you are given. Fortunately, there is a workaround, but let’s first look at some reasons why mixing WPF into a windows form application might not be the best idea:

  • Consistent appearance is the first reason that comes to mind. WPF windows look just a little different to Windows Forms (with default settings) and even more different if you apply all the fancy styling options. Of course, if you are looking to create a window with a distinct look, this doesn’t apply
  • Maintainable code is another reason. Supporting multiple types of windowing increases the complexity of your project

There may be others and hopefully someone will point them out in the comments.

But now back to adding a WPF window into your Windows Forms project. Without the Window option, begrudgingly select User Control (WPF). Visual Studio then adds all the necessary references to your project and create a new XAML file and a corresponding CS file (or VB if you are that way inclined).

It turns out that User controls and Windows are very similar, so in your XAML file, change the “UserControl” tag to “Window” (remember to also update the closing tag). Your XAML should now look something like this:

Finally update your code file to remove the UserControl inheritance. (It’s already defined in your XAML anyway).

/// 
/// Interaction logic for UserControl1.xaml
/// 
public partial class UserControl1
{
    public UserControl1()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
    }
}

Then you can play with the WPF window as you would expect.

MobileMe is making me angry

Published
by
Rhys
on July 27, 2008
in i-think IT
. 0 Comments
MobileMe: Another computer is syncing message window

MobileMe: Another computer is syncing

I’ve seen this dialog far too many times today. The only saving grace of this error message is that it doesn’t seem to steal my focus. However it is so huge and in the middle of the screen it is quite probable that it is covering up whatever text I happen to be working on at the time. The fact it needs to remind me of this fact (it just did it again then) so often is just crazy.

But why is it even necessary? Will my world come to a grinding halt if I don’t know that my contacts couldn’t be synced in the background right now? Really? Who cares? Can I do anything about it? No. Clearly MobileMe just wants to point out its inadequacies.

Violet iDisk icon

Violet iDisk icon

Talking about inadequacies, who chose the colour for the background of the iDisk icon. Violet? Seriously? It’s as if they kept the “transparent colour” and forgot to substitute the real one. Come on Apple, you are all about design, but someone screwed the pooch on this one.

And the way MobileMe was installed, as part of iTunes, now that seems a bit unintuitive to me. (Why would a program that plays music have anything to do with keeping my calendar and contacts synchronised).

Of course, when MobileMe is working it seems to live up to some of the “cloud” hype. I finally have my contacts integrated into Outlook (plus the calendar), which is a big plus, or it would be if I put things in my calendar or opened outlook more frequently than once a week (but that’s my problem (or not)).

So hopefully Apple will fix this stupid error message (I’m happy to have a little notify icon flash or something if it really wants to get my attention). Less importantly I hope they change the background colour of the iDisk icon.

And once that’s done maybe we can focus on real problems.