Hobart again

Back in Hobart, and enjoying the wireless network that my mum's got running now. Seems to work ok, although I suspect if I had a native Airport card that used the inbuilt antenna on the Pismo G3 the range would be a little better than the performance I am getting from this Belkin PCMCIA wi-fi card.
There's a new (ish) bike store in Hobart called Bowman-Pimms Bike Ride. It's in Liverpool St just down from the mall. They have some nice looking Orbea and Cannondale bikes there.
The weather here's quite summery, with the smell of bushfire smoke floating on the breeze.

On FireWire

The future of the IEEE 1394 (FireWire 400) link is apparently coming under a lot of speculation, as this article at MacMod alludes. Certainly, the rapid expansion of the USB 2.0 empire has been seriously cutting into FireWire's cake, and for consumer peripherals like portable music players, digital camera card readers and the like, FireWire no longer has any visible presence. The current line of iPods no longer support FireWire, even.
USB 2.0 is ubiquitous - being an Intel thing - especially on PCs, so the lack of FireWire devices would hardly matter to many. For those of us with older Apple computers (which seem to stay capable for longer than equivalent specced PCs), it's either FireWire or USB 1, which is painfully slow for anything except perhaps a printer and user input devices. For digital photography work I use a Lexar FireWire CF card reader, which was hard to track down and quite a bit more expensive than an equivalent USB 2.0 device, and my iPod is early generation and uses a direct FireWire connection.

It seems that a safe haunt for FireWire for some time will be the audio-visual production scene. DV cameras use it under some guise for data transfer, and for mobile recording with a laptop it's the only way to go if you want to record more than two channels at a time.
FireWire was developed largely by Apple, and USB 1/USB 2 by Intel. With Apple's move to Intel chips, it will interesting to see how the future of FireWire 400 fares. It seems that in practice FireWire 400 and the much quicker FireWire 800 offer superior performance and versatility compared with the current offerings from the USB camp.

back in sunny Melbourne

Got back to Melbourne yesterday afternoon. The combined 19-hour flight from Europe (in this case, Vienna) to Melbourne via Singapore is a killer.
All in all a good trip. Some great links made, and thanks to all who I was able to meet and greet on the journey. It will be good to come back soon.
I'm writing this at 4am as I awoke early due to a bit of jet-laggy stuff, I think.

Back in Vienna after a pleasant couple of days in Salzburg. The weather has been fine (if expectedly cool) and the train ride was very nice and scenic.

Heading for home tomorrow.

Well, having thought that my wireless card was on the blink, I've now found it works fine and I'm posting from the departure lounge at Heathrow. T-mobile are charging a fiver for an hour.

Off to Vienna soon, but it appears that the flight has been delayed by an hour.

Back in Bournemouth after a crazy road trip north - Bournemouth to Cardiff to Glasgow, via Blackpool and Lancaster. We went north from Wales through Shropshire and stopped at a cheese shop/cafe near Leominster.
I'd wanted to visit Blackpool to see what the kitsch British seaside holiday resort was like. It was mostly all closed up, and a somewhat bleak place. The promenade abounds with `fun' places and of course the large tower.
Glasgow was good. A good Ship of Fools meet was had with about 19 people. While there I also visited Glasgow Cathedral which was really excellent. It has a great underneath bit.