Melbourne International Airport – Flight Schedule

Here is the link to the Flight Schedule page for the Melbourne International Airport – link. Useful for last-minute check of the flight schedule and any changes. Touch wood, that has not happened yet in my travels.

Borobudur

Here’s a tourist site for Yogja and, more precisely, Borobudur – link. It has some amazing photographs of the place. Definitely something worth seeing while in Indonesia.

World Standards – Electricity

Looking for the information about electrical plugs in Indonesia, I came across an awesome page that describes electrical standards throughout the world. Voltage, frequency, plugs and sockets are all shown here together with world maps that display the distribution of each standard. Excellent resource to check before any international travel.

As it turns out, Indonesia has the same plugs (C and F) that are used in continental Europe so I can use my existing plug adapters for Australian plugs.

Electricity around the world

Iceland - Renewable Energy

Years back, in 2004 I think, I studied an Environmental Science course as a part of my curriculum. It counted as both science and social science credit. My main paper in this class was about Iceland's 30-year plan on becoming a renewable energy country, transferring it's whole use of energy to renewable sources.
How weird it is today, in the company I work for, that I actually met a guy who sat in the committee that recommended this plan to the Government for approval. Things like this don't happen too often. Or maybe they do? The theme of moving the whole economy to use renewable sources was a grand one. I used the Iceland story to illustrate the point, citing conclusions and achievements made during that project in it's early stages, in various discussions on the topic.
Now the things became more realistic, talking to a person who was closely involved in the process. Just like with many other things, once discovered they become much more real and loose a sense of magic and romance to them. However, I appreciate the experience earned in the process. Guess that's life.

iPod

For the merging with another company, we received a small gift by the new owners. iPod Nano 8GB with a video camera and microphone. This is a small token of appreciation but, nevertheless, leaves a nice feeling. Especially considering we never got anything from the previous company owners. Not even a simple thanks for all the efforts and Saturdays and Sundays spent at work.
Now I'm adding Balasevic songs onto the player so I can listen to them when I'm outside. All these people looked funny to me when I saw everyone carrying the earphones while walking or running. Now I'm joining them, I guess.

Citizenship Update

Today I called to book the citizenship test as I heard that there are long waiting queues for these. So I wanted to book earlier. However, in Melbourne, the schedule was full until the 9th of November. The further schedule has not been released yet as there are changes going forward on 19th of October.
The changes include no mandatory questions in the citizenship test, questions written in plain English, a new preparation book, and a passmark raised from 60% to 75% correct answers.
The test will now be taken AFTER the citizenship application has been submitted and as a part of that process. It is not required to do a test before the application. I did the online sample test and had 19 out of 20 questions correct. (wohoo)

Another positive fact is that holidays abroad are not taken into considerations (are not considered as being absent from Australia for residence requirements purposes) if they are shorter than 3 months. This effectively cuts my expected residence time down for 2 months. Instead of March 2010, I should now be eligible for citizenship in January.
The counter has just gone to 150 yesterday and now, taking into consideration the above provision, it goes instantly to 92! Only three months left. Now I'm positively surprised and puzzled to a point as this was unexpected.

Irish Vote Could Cause the Move in EU

Irish vote last Friday was overwhelmingly positive, supporting the Lisbon treaty. This would move the EU in the direction of federalization. It is expected that the foreign-ministry for the whole of EU would be formed now. This would greatly help the Balkans and especially Bosnia and Herzegovina where the EU administration is as chaotic as the local Bosnian one.
This vote would also disperse Germany and France's reasons for vetoing the further EU enlargement. Hopefully things move from the dead end now...

T-Shirt Time

Tomorrow is the 1st of October. I think it is fair to say that it is the start of the T-Shirt time. Today was already warm enough that a wind jacket was not needed over a t-shirt, even in the wind. Right now it is 22:30 and the temperature is 19 degrees Celsius. If September was the Spring, is October the Summer already? :)

Mobile Phone Shops in Melbourne

Here are a few links to mobile phone shops that I use to compare prices of the latest phones in Australia. When I find an interesting PDA/smartphone at gsmarena, these are the shops where I can see the actual price on the market.
It is amazing that these usually have better prices (and warranty) than ebay sellers!

www.shopbot.com.au
www.ow.com.au
www.dse.com.au
www.allphones.com.au

openSuse LiveCD

I spent some more time playing with openSUSE LiveCD on my Toshiba A-215 laptop. This time, I copied my WEP key onto a USB flash drive so I can find it later. However, things went very, very smoothly this time. I bet having some time and enough sleep really help in that regard.
It was relatively simple to configure wireless connection. I added the WEP key (without dashes) into wi-fi configuration and networking was up! From then on I had access to a large repository of help, available online.
This time, also, it was really easy to mount the NTFS partition. I guess the only difference was using "ntfs-3g" instead of "ntfs" in the mount parameters. I was able to mount the Windows partition immediately and all my files were available. Of course, the USB stick (actually an SD card reader attached to USB port) was recognised on boot, too. There, in the list of devices, was also the built-in multi-card reader.
Then I tried to play some music and movies. After a little bit of playing around I found everything worked well. Installed amarok-xine package to be able to play mp3 files. I guess something similar is required to be able to play movies, as LiveCD does not contain stuff like proprietary codecs, etc.
Well, as of right now, everything runs as one would expect. I also played with some more software in a virtual machine yesterday. Everything seems pretty smooth. Firefox crashed a couple of times but the virtual machine had 300MB of RAM assigned only.
Yesterday I also imported fonts from my Windows box and used Tahoma as the default font. All very straightforward. On my laptop, the default font seems quite OK so I don't really need any Windows fonts.
Pidgin is available as a rpm package. Latest version can be found on the build project (software.opensuse.org). Adding a new repository is simple and it provides the latest version of Pidgin.
I really can't think of much other software I might need. I'd like to try Skype with video calls, VMWare Workstation/Server or some other VM software. Also, games, Quicken, and MS Office using Wine. This is just to see if Wine is as useful now as I read the other day.
Also, Mono is awesome. It runs KeePass 2.08 perfectly. There is no autotype feature, however, but it functions well otherwise. I do not have to downgrade my password file to old version to use KeePassX or other software. There are a couple of solutions available with Linux, like KWallet, but at the moment I really like KeePass and the functionality it provides. I might rely more on browser password keeping later but at least the passwords are taken care of, too.

I guess the only real thing left now is make a backup of my files and Vista system and perform the installation of openSUSE. I'd like to have ext4 as my default filesystem but that might not really matter at this moment.
I'll spend some more time thinking of and listing software I'm using and see if there are equivalents in Linux. Some software, not available for Linux, will run happily with Wine (which I have to confirm first) and the rest can be run in a virtual machine. So, I guess it is now the time when even Windows development tasks can be performed under Linux. :) Awesome...

Edit:
Dvorak keyboard layout - supported by default. I'd like to have an easy way to switch to Qwerty for cut/copy/paste functionality. There is a way, I just need to read a bit about it.
Webcam - Kopete displays the Chicony USB 2.0 webcam. Apparently, gqcam displays the video stream from the camera. The camera is found in USB devices but none of the programs I tried could use it from /dev/input/input10.
Mouse works well, including the Back-Forward buttons (4 and 5) on my IntelliMouse Optical.
Hibernation - There is an option to hibernate the system but it did not work with LiveCD. Which is understandable as it runs from a CD and creates a RAMdisk (most probably), so no hibernation is possible to either of these media.
PocketPC Sync - http://www.synce.org/. Need to look into it more.
Dropbox has a client for Linux. LogMeIn also work under Linux.