Paul McCormack’s Web Site

Stockton is huge beach just 2 hours north of Sydney with some of the largest sand dunes in Australia (and even the world). It is now managed by the National Parks and Wildlife Service so that this amazing environment can be better protected. Thankfully, they still allow access for vehicles at a very cheap price - just $10 for a 3-day pass.

When we bought our Jeep Cherokee just over a year ago, the dealership told us that they had just organised a day trip up to Stockton Beach for a number of their clients. This was the first time that we had heard about Stockton, but we were keen to give it a go.

As Mum and Bob are staying with us at the moment, I arranged a guided trip. Deborah is currently 19 weeks pregnant, so we thought it best that she stayed behind to the three of us packed up for the day and headed off.

We met up with the group and headed off to the southern end of the beach. Before getting onto the sand we stopped in a car park and let our tyre pressure down from 33 to 16 psi. Once deflated, we set off and were soon onto a massive open area of the beach where we were given our first basic lesson about sand driving.

As you would expect, the key to driving on sand is to increase the surface area contact of the tyres (by deflating the tyres) and keep up the momentum when going through soft sand or up dunes. The advice for this technique is “Drive it like you stole it” and it works!

We visited a number of famous areas on the beach including the wreck of the Sygna, The Bowl, the tank traps and Tin City, but the highlight was driving down a 100-foot dune at a silly angle!

The sand was so steep that when disturbed, the whole dune slipped under foot. No worries - the key to getting down was 1st gear high ratio or 2nd gear low ratio and just drive straight down the dune. I had a go first with Mum and Bob watching from the bottom but then I handed the keys to Mum to let her have a go. Not that I had much choice!!

Our group was made up of the usual range of 4WD vehicles as well as some All-Wheel-Drive’s like the Toyota Rav4 and Mazda Tribute which coped equally well with the sand.

I can’t wait to get back out there - hopefully when my brother visits in about 6 weeks. Now that we’ve done a guided tour, I’m fully confident that a trip with a couple of mates would be a piece of cake. The thing to remember is that “the beach is perfectly safe until you forget that it’s dangerous”!

I’ve been busy researching how to securely send e-mails from this web site and I have found a clever little plugin that does just what I want.

The Contact page has a form that will be e-mailed to me when correctly submitted. It uses spam protection to check your name and e-mail address against known spammers and also a check that you are human by typing in characters from an image.

It’s a shame that it is not safe to just post an e-mail address on a web site, but that’s the nature of the Internet.

If you know my e-mail (and it’s not hard to guess if you are already on this site - here’s a clue: paul at …) then you can also get in touch via instant messenger. My e-mail address is also my ID for Jabber and MSN Messenger.

The same details should also work for direct VoIP calling if you have a VoIP provider that allows you to call direct. No surprises that BT Openworld is not one of these. You could try Ekiga.net as a free alternative.

I have UK and Australian phone numbers - drop me an e-mail or IM for details.

Talk to you soon!

Seems a little late to be making an announcement, but as this web site is new this is the first opportunity I have to announce that we are expecting our first child in early July 2008. We are obviously both delighted and we’re really looking forward to the excitement and challenge of becoming parents.

I think that Deborah that posted some ultrasound pictures on the Humblebee web site. There should be a link in the right column of this page.

I have been using VoIP phones for some time now and have found the quality and reliability to be excellent. I was previously using Skype, but I was frustrated with the frequent drop-outs and the lack of updates on Linux.

Asterisk has been out for a long time, but I hadn’t had time to look into it. I was happy enough with my Linksys SPA-3102 which I had set up with a clever dial plan so that any international calls were routed out to a UK VoIP provider, but all Australian calls would dial out over the POTS Optus line.

There were a couple of problems with this set up. The main one being that every so often the SPA-3102 would throw a tantrum and refuse to connect to the UK VoIP provider. This was the push that I needed to look further into Asterisk.

After a couple of weeks of playing around (and getting into trouble from Deborah as a result), I now have a great system that allows me to make and receive calls. Genius.

OK, so it does a bit more than that thankfully. The following is a list of the features that I have enabled:

• Our Nokia E65 phones connect to Asterisk via Wireless LAN when we enter the house and become “extensions” of the home phone system
• The SPA-3102 answers incoming Optus calls and passes them to Asterisk to handle
• After 10pm, the calls are screened to check if they are urgent. If they are, the caller presses 9 to be connected otherwise they press 1 and leave us a message
• All phones, including mobiles ring on an incoming call
• The UK VoIP calls are also handled by Asterisk
• Outbound calls are routed via choice of UK or Australian VoIP providers for least cost routing (I found that MyNetFone (AU) was cheaper than SipGate (UK) for UK land line calls)
• Speed Dialling from any phone (including mobiles) i.e. *0LEE (*0533) calls Lee

I am still to get the incoming caller ID to work. So far, the SPA-3102 recognises the CID but does not pass it to the Asterisk server. Once I get this working, then I will be able to have rules based on incoming caller. For example, when I call home via my mobile I will get a custom message that will allow me to do onward dialling to call the UK amongst other things.

Now all we need is a reason to call people!

Welcome to my new web site. I was getting bored with the old one and I didn’t have the time or inclination to maintain it. As a result, the security holes that are often found in php-Nuke were not getting patched and it was only a matter of time before somebody hacked it (again).

This web site is run on WordPress which I hope will be more secure, but more importantly the security updates will install automagically. I’ve not got around to installing the Gallery yet. I may just leave that on the HumbleBee web site which is our family home page.

That’s all for now. I hope that you like the changes.