This is Robin Whittle's main website: http://www.firstpr.com.au
My new site is the Astrophysics of the Non-Exploding Universe: http://astroneu.com
Information, prices, pictures and
sound samples (MP3 and Real Audio G2) for the Real World Interfaces Devil Fish mods are at rwi/dfish/. TR-606 modifications are
at: rwi/tr-606/. Also a page with information on
modifications to Casio musical instruments from the early 1980s.
Details of these cost-effective boards are at rwi/smem/.
The gallery/ contains images of paintings and drawings by Adriana Hardy - who drew the portrait of me which near the bottom of this page. I often really enjoy children's art and Adriana's bold, colourful, largely abstract designs make a big impression on me. These images range from mid 1997, when she was four and a half to April 2002, when she was nearly nine. Click on any of these images to see many more:
(Images © Adriana Hardy 1997 and 2002.)
This is a 0.0001 radian (0.0057 degree) high section of the Hubble Deep Field images of a section of the Universe, in the northern skies, where it is possible to see a long way without many stars from our galaxy obscuring the view. The angle subtended by a human hair held at arm's length is about the angle in the vertical direction of this image. The barred spiral galaxy to the top middle left is probably like our own - about 100,000 light years in diameter. Since it subtends an angle of about 1/50,000 radians, it is reasonable to estimate that the galaxy is around 5 billion light years away. Read more at http://astroneu.com about this and other images, and about the cosmological redshift, which is the main reason for believing in the Big Bang and the expansion of the Universe. Unfortunately, many astronomers regard this as a fact, but it is just a theory. If it could be shown that light, whilst traveling through the intergalactic medium (very low density hydrogen and helium atoms, a few electrons and ions etc.) for a year loses one part in 14 billion of its energy, then this would explain the cosmological redshift. In that case there would be no reason to believe the Universe is expanding, or that it "began" with a "Big Bang". Meanwhile, the heating and acceleration of the solar corona and solar wind remain unexplained by conventional theories . . .
The average Slinky is fine for walking down steps, but I want to send waves! I have finally solved the limitations of short Slinkies, and many of the problems of gravity, to make my 21.4 metre (71 feet) Sliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinky. Click on the photo to enter the slinky/ directory for more photos, wild piezo-pickup audio MP3s and some videos too . . .
The icm/ directory contains information about concerts and Australian organisations.
The eclectic/ directory contains my Yum-Yum Gourmet Breakfast Toast recipe and Nature-2.0.doc a rare communication from God and Mother Nature discussing the bugs in Nature 1.0 and giving a glimpse of features in the new version 2.0.
The csound/ directory contains introductory material and links regarding the Csound music synthesis language, and some of my work on this program. See the dsp/pink-noise/ directory for a roundup on DSP generation of pink noise. I have a treatise on the Carta optimisation of the Park Miller "minimal standard" pseudo-random number generator, with C, C++ and dsPIC assembly language source code: dsp/rand31/ .
I was honoured to receive a visit from that most dignified of insects, a striding, clambering stick-insect. I took a few Polaroid photos, scanned them, but them on the Web and emailed friends about it within an hour or so. See the photos of my distinguished, seven inch long visitor in the stick-insect/ directory!
Old photos and postcards, a colour photo from 1913. A hand-drawn poster from the 1950s-60s. 1938 handwriting. Corsetry adverts. German Valentines Day postcards posted in Pennsylvania ca. 1911. Photographs of mountain ash and rain forest at the Little Franklin River, South Gippsland. Two detailed photographs of the Sun Beachgirl Quest in the late 1940s or early 1950s. A rag doll angel and one from Waverley Cemetery, Bronte, Sydney. Green ants, mangroves, trees, rattan and little sand balls on the beach near Cape Tribulation in Far Northern Queensland. Click on a photo or peruse the show-and-tell/ directory. Also, a report on how government surveillance and compulsory RFID tagging of citizens is keeping us safe from the threat which lurks within.
The Show and Tell department now includes a 380 word essay by Lachlan Hardy called I Dream . . . . . . . , which his teacher really liked:
- Utilisation of IPv4 address space If we are about to run out of IPv4 address space, why are there only about 107 million computers on the Internet which return pings? There are over two billion IP addresses, so this is a low rate of "host density". The ip/ section has some analysis of current use of the IPv4 address space, with what may be unique information on the distribution of host densities among various prefixes.
- Ivip (Internet Vastly Improved Plumbing) A proposal to allow the Internet's routing and addressing system to provide multihoming, portability and traffic engineering for vastly more users, each with their own IP addresses and subnets, than is possible within the limitations of the BGP routing system. ip/ivip/ .
- Web email software web-mail/ A survey of software for email via the Web. Also how I installed (on Red Hat 7.1) the mail programs Postfix, Courier IMAP. Courier Maildrop, Courier SqWebMail, IMP and the new web-mail program Postman, from University of Valencia, Spain. Also, how I integrated Spam Assassin and Anomy Sanitizer to filter spam, viruses and other malware, as part of my Courier Maildrop server-based email filtering system.
- Computer Systems Administration sys-admin/
- Problems with HTML email - and why I think email clients should default to plain text, fixed width fonts and sensible WYSIWYG on-screen text wrapping.
- Silent Hard Drive - how to make an aluminium case to keep hard drives really cool and quiet. Also some notes on CPU and power supply fans and on the beautiful Panasonic Sirocco centrifugal blowers.
- TIFF to PDF conversion - creating single or multi-page PDF files from one or more TIFF files.
- Little Blimps blimp/ Why flap, zoom or whoosh when you could be floating, and pedaling, or maybe being propelled by solar power. Flight can be like snorkeling and SCUBA diving! Above the treetops, at leisure - provided the wind is slight. This page links to sites and a mailing list for single person or at least very small blimps, including one magnificent pedal-powered craft White Dwarf.Also some links regarding cluster ballooning - tie a bunch of large helium balloons to you and . . . . . . .
- Highlights of the Link Discussion List link/ Link is a lively Australian discussion list for IT, censorship, privacy etc. This page contains, or links to, highlights of this list, starting with discussions on ASCII art, problems and benefits of open-source software, and problems in educational arrangements and paper qualifications in technical fields such as electronics and computer systems administration.
- Book design with Open Office book-design/ The openoffice.org suite of software is an open-source "equivalent" to Microsoft Office. But Open Office goes far beyond Microsoft Word's capabilities for creating complex documents with character styles, multiple indexes and bibliographies etc. Here I explore using OpenOffice Writer, together with the open-source Ghostscript equivalent to Adobe's Acrobat Distiller - to do the complete book writing, layout and .PDF file production process on freely available open-source software. If this works well, then it is a vastly more elegant approach than the various messy arrangements more commonly used in the publishing industry, such as writing in Word, then transferring the manuscript into Quark Xpress for greater typographic and layout control, and then doing manual indexing and other horrors. OpenOffice Writer's style system is vastly more powerful and has greater scope than MS Word's. No-one makes money from this, so there is no advertising - but users and people who write about software for magazines will be shouting from the rooftops as they figure out the power, rigour and (from what I have heard) the robustness of this free software.
The musicmar/ directory contains material relating to music marketing with discovery, and ultimately delivery, taking place via the Internet. This includes direct artist to listener relationships which are not burdened by the risks, costs and restrictions such as geographic proximity and stylistic compatibility with advertising.
The audiocomp/ directory contains material on both lossy and lossless audio compression algorithms. There are tests on the fidelity of MPEG Audio Layer 3, AAC and Yamaha's Twin VQ audio compression schemes. The lossless page is the most extensive test of lossless audio compression programs.
The issues/ directory contains three major sets of material. Firstly the battle over telemarketing regulation. Australia is about to get a decent opt-out list, but only for protecting residential numbers, not the numbers of businesses.
Secondly, my submission to the Senate Select Committee on Information Technology concerning problems in the regulation of a number of fields, including: Calling Number Display, outbound telemarketing, Customer Activated Malicious Call Trace, Internet censorship, SPAM email, privacy in the mass media and in Internet communications and the need for federal privacy legislation to cover the activities of companies.
Thirdly, my submission to the same committee on the government's Internet censorship bill, which was passed in the Senate on 25 May 1999. This deeply cynical piece of legislation cannot last. (Ahem - in late 2006 it is still in place.) It is a scandal it was ever proposed, let alone passed.
See the security/ section for a warning on this - which you can email to people, or point them to, if they send you executable programs via email. Some August 2003 information on 3 critical security vulnerabilities, and how to stop pop-up ads, on various versions of Windows. A warning about Microsoft Outlook Express being extremely insecure and susceptible to email virus/worm attack. Information on the "SirCam" and "Nimda" email virus / worms which affect Windows computers - and some links regarding virus hoaxes.
I'm serious. Mice are a global RSI catastrophe. See the ergonomics/ section for the solution. This section also describes my experience with the Microsoft "Natural Keyboard" and why I decided to stop using it.
Until September 2002, despite reading The Age assiduously, I had never seen a map showing how many Israeli settlements are built all over the land which was, and should still be, Palestine. Nor did I realise how restricted in their own lands the Palestinians were. Click the image or here to see a full-size, detailed, map from the Foundation for Middle East Peace http://www.fmep.org which shows the Occupied Territories, the settlements (blue triangles) and the areas of Palestinian Authority control (partial and full). The settlements and the severe restrictions and fragmentation of Palestinian life by Israel convince me that successive Israeli governments have no interest at all in giving Palestinians even a fraction of their land, or any sense of practical or social cohesiveness, as any people would need to live happily, healthily and in peace.
Israel can only do this with the financial, technological and political support of the USA. Both the USA and Israel are democracies. The problem here is not despots - but democratic nations systematically killing and oppressing all Palestinians. I support the UN intervening militarily, where possible, to remove the most vicious dictatorships such as in Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea and Burma. But I do not support doing this while the UN and most other wealthy nations tolerate two of the richest and most powerful democracies systematically destroying the lives, health and hope of the Palestinians. (A few other dictatorships come to mind too, such as Cuba and Saudi Arabia . . . )
Click on the map below to see maps of Australia and of the Melbourne area. There are also some photos from space, and links to the Bureau of Meteorology for the latest satellite photos, rainfall charts, synoptic chart and forecasts. This page also contains photos of some extraordinary weather conditions, bushfires and the like - and links to the sites where you can find more about Australian weather and climate. It also includes a description of a wonderful map of Australia from the Australian Geographic Society. There are all sorts of interesting geographical, demographic and meteorological things to be found by clicking on the map below! Also, some links to web sites concerning celebrated Melbourne cartoonist Michael Leunig.
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I am a 1955 model, English by birth and Australian by choice and citizenship.
I married Tina (previously Tina Clark from Houston, Texas and New York NY) in 2004. You can read a little about us by clicking on the picture below:
There is also detailed, but not entirely up-to-date curriculum vitae of my electronic, software,
consulting, advocacy and writing work.
My email address is rw@firstpr.com.auMelbourne time
- North American callers check the timezones here before calling!
- European callers: Australian time is 10 hours before the time in the UK.
- To see the current time in Melbourne, including with daylight saving (summertime): http://www.thetimenow.com/index.pl?loc=11
- A page which shows the current time in Melbourne and a global view with sunlight and darkness with cities shown clearly: http://worldbuddy.com/buddy.cgi/Australia/Melbourne .
- There's a US Navy timezone map here . I have a less blurry version here: TimeZoneMap2003-sharper.gif
- A real-time converter from any timezone to any other http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzc (I found these at the fab Open Directory Project http://dmoz.org .)
Australian Business Number for First Principles and Real World Interfaces: ABN 54 367 581 108
My family's mining software business, Whittle Consulting, is http://www.whittleconsulting.com.au .
Last update 2008 May 13 This site is an animated .gif-, frames-, flash-, shockwave-, Java- and javascript-free zone! There are some Google Adsense ads on a few pages. These HTML files were created directly with Netscape Communicator 4.7x. and since August 2001, open-source Mozilla and then KomPozer KomPozer rocks!
© Robin Whittle 1996 to 2008.
