Simon Rumble’s blog

I've wanted to see the Tank Stream, Sydney's first water source, for a long time. While it provided clean water to the original white settlers, it quickly became polluted and these days is little more than a sewer. It was replaced by Busby's Bore in 1830 following Sydney's first major engineering project cost and time blowout, a tradition followed today by all major engineering projects in the state.

Anyway, in February this year I found a form on the Historic Houses Trust site that claimed I would be notified when the next ballot for tours of the Tank Stream were being announced. Except they didn't tell me that there's there'll be tours next month as part of the Sydney Open 08 thing, which sees a bunch of properties open for tours.

Fortunately I spotted it and put today into my calendar. I now have tickets to do the tour on 2nd November. If you want to see the Tank Stream, get in now. We're doing the 15:45 tour.

Apparently guerilla gardening has come to Marrickville, with people taking over the grass verges in their streets. There's no grass verge on our street but I've noticed a few people have planted ornamentals around the trees. In our old street there was sage and rosemary around some of the trees.

I'd actually been thinking recently about planting nasturtiums around the tree out the front of our place, because it's a very hardy, attractive plant and both the leaves and flowers make a good addition to salads. I'm also intrigued by the recipe for nasturtium seed "capers" that I found in the River Cottage Preserves book.

Now if the nasturtium seeds I've had sown for a couple of weeks would just sprout already!

I love Metacritic's summaries of reviews. This one summarises reviews of an album by The Little Ones. As usual, NME is incoherently raving. For the NME, a band is either the greatest band ever, or an overhyped pile of crap (which is what their great band ever bands often are).

The funny review comes from The Guardian:

By the end of the album, your face will hurt and you'll be desperate for some Napalm Death.

This sounds like previously unaccomplished levels of saccharine! I'll have to check them out.

On a related note, I've always thought that if you worked in a new age shop, with all that whale fart ambient music playing all day, surely you'd have to have some death metal or speed thrash once you got home. To help you relax.

JavaScript's same origin policy security model means that a script can't (directly... there are sneaky ways aroun dit) request data from another site. It's quite strict. foo.site.com is different to site.com.

One thing I'd always assumed, but now I see how it wasn't a sensible assumption, was that the piece of code calling the data had to be served by the same domain name it was going to be calling. I've just done a little test of this, and discovered that's not true.

So if you're dead keen to see it, have a look at this test which loads the script from stout.rumble.net and actually loads Prototype from somewhere completely different. It has no trouble pulling data from www.rumble.net, but won't let me drag data from stout.rumble.net.

So the banks are crying poor, claiming there's not enough liquidity in the market. You'd think this would mean their savings interest rates would be hovering somewhere around the RBA Cash Rate so they could encourage some deposits.

My bank's "high interest" savings account is currently paying its loyal customers a "huge" (their word) 6.75%. But new customers get 8.1%. Nice way to treat your existing customers!

If getting bought by one of the big four banks wasn't enough incentive to find another bank, this treatment of long-term customers is!

Stop me if you've heard this before. It's been around for ages. I keep getting asked to explain how this subprime crap works. Apart from explaining that Lurlene and Jethro, who've never had jobs in their lives, were able to get mortgages to move out of the trailer into a seven bedroom home, there's a slightly more complicated backstory to how this idiocy has happened.

This presentation, while very funny, is also quite a good explanation of how subprime has destroyed the economy. It also explains why we really shouldn't be bailing out the idiots who made this happen. In fact, it already provides a really good practical example for the Wikipedia Moral hazard article.

Update: Des sends this excellent Bird and Fortune video which also does a good job at explaining the mess.

An article on the Daily Telegraph site seems a little confused, geographically.

A MILLIONAIRE banker was beaten to death by a mob after stepping in to save a couple being assaulted at a taxi rank in London.

...The family went out for dinner on Saturday evening in Norwich, southeast England, after which Mr McGarahan's wife Alison and their children, aged seven and four months, returned to their hotel.

Okay, first of all, Norwich isn't in "southeast England". Second, Norwich is not a suburb of London, so neither the assault nor the taxi rank were "in London". This BBC piece kinda gives that away, particularly the multiple references to Norfolk Police.

One wonders whether their "correspondents in London" really are, or if it's just a sub-editor in Sydney hacking up the Reuters piece.

A great letter in this week's Guardian Weekly.

If Bill Goodman (Letters, September 5) is indeed correct that atheism is in and of itself a religious belief, then surely not collecting stamps is a hobby.
James Beattie
Reservoir, Victoria, Australia

I've been watching the space of low-power wireless networking for some time, as it has some cool possibilities for sensor networks. ZigBee is one such standard that seems to be gaining support. It's a lot simpler and lower power than other protocols like Bluetooth.

Make magazine had a really interesting article recently about using ZigBee inertial sensors to track the crashes and hits taken by a roller derby team, and use it to trigger "zap", "pow", "boom" sound effects. Very cool, and it all seemed quite simple!

I'd like to use the ZigBee temperature sensors in my garden. The long-term plan is to monitor the weather and supply tank water through an irrigation system only when it's needed.

So has anyone used this ZigBee stuff and know any good resources to start out?

Already had a few responses about wireless sensors. Des suggests looking at SquidBee which is an open implementation. Quite interesting.

Rich recommends a book, Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects, which I've ordered. Looks very interesting. He also suggested Little Bird Electronics' workshops on the Arduino. There's one next weekend and I'm very tempted...

Thanks for the tips guys!