I received my sparkling new Yess DVB-T1288 STB on Monday, which I bought off ebay for $147.50 + $19 postage. I'm quite happy with it. Things that I like:

• Picture and sound are both noticeably better.
• Reception is perfect (now that I've moved the aerial around). Most channels are hovering around 100%, channel 10 is 90%.
• I like the program guide feature. It displays the picture in a little box while you scroll through the channels looking at what's on now and next.
• Displays a clock when not turned on. Not like my stupid DVD player that just displays ":". Fat lot of good that is.

• Remote is quite crap (as expected).
• Seems to be no way to select which channels are included in channel up/down. Why would I want HDTV channels when the STB can't display them?
• 4:3 full screen mode seems slightly too big!
• When it loses reception it makes a horrible noise.
• I crashed it once yesterday. Even the standby button didn't work!

Ebay Purchase #2: Universal remote control

Now this is a different kettle of fish. (Now there's a stupid expression - why would anyone put fish in a kettle?) It arrived on Tuesday, but as I went to put batteries in it, I noticed something odd. It's missing the metal contacts on one end of the battery compartment! What the??? I'm not particularly impressed, I'll try to get a refund for it. Strangely, the battery compartment contains a sticker that says "QC - Passed". What sort of quality control is that?

Solaris

It's a nasty piece of work. My task yesterday was to write a program that gathers network usage statistics over time. I'd done this before using libpcap, but that approach was questionable. We want to use statistics captured by the kernel instead. All well and good on our desktop machines, but when I go to the target hardware, their dumb-ass network card drivers don't track how many bytes they send and receive. Only number of packets. Bah.

So I started reworking the old libpcap-based program instead. Now it tracks the statistics for every source/destination pair by extracting the IP header from the raw data. It can then categorise all data into sent and received by comparing the source IP to the local machine's IP. I think it's pretty cool, and it works sweetly on our desktop machines. It was certainly good fun to write. But once again, it doesn't work properly on the target hardware. Here, libpcap only picks up incoming messages. Stupid RAMiX cards.

Money

My fiancée and I are going to see a financial advisor soon. We were sent a pre-meeting questionnaire to do first. My fiancée calculated her annual salary. Shockingly, it was about $7000pa more than mine. Yet one often hears about nurses going on strike demanding more money. Never software engineers. It's funny if you think about it.

Miriam

(Written yesterday) Tonight is the final episode of There's Something About Miriam, where she "reveals her secret". (Most of the world has probably seen this episode already.) It promises to be the television event of the year. I'm very much looking forward to it. I can imagine the "winner" going suddenly from his moment of triumph, to feelings shock and dismay. Obviously, the real winner was the guy who was evicted in the first week (and still got a nice big out of court settlement).

(Written today) It was quite good, but could have been better. They brought back all the old contestants, and they all thought it was really funny. The guy who won went from triumph to shock as expected, but still said he would go on the cruise with her. Then he shook hands with her (!) and they walked off inside holding hands, with him scratching his head. That was probably the funniest part. Then later he changed his mind about the cruise and talked about being deceived. I have no sympathy for people who go on reality TV shows.

Birthday

For my birthday on Sunday we went around several breweries in the Swan Valley. We started at the Feral Brewery in Baskerville. They have six different beers (mild, white, pilsener, pale ale, German red, and stout). I had a tasting rack containing all six. Excellent value for $10. The white and the German red were particularly tasty.

Next up we went to the Duckstein in Henley Brook for lunch. The Duckstein is now about five years old, and is an excellent place to visit. I was drinking the krystal weissen, a nice cloudy wheat beer. The service was pretty poor while we were there - lunch took almost an hour, and then dessert about 20 minutes. But the food was as good as always, and good company can make up for a lot.

We finished the day at the Ironbark Brewery in Caversham. I tried two of their beers - the wheat beer and the amber stout. I wasn't too keen on the stout, but the wheat beer was delicious.

My mates bought be a homebrew kit for my birthday, so I now I can make my own. Should be good, once I work out a suitable place for brewing. Also got some tools. Tools are always good.