Canberra is a very bicycle friendly city, relatively flat with light traffic and ample space for bicycle lanes. Nearby hills such as Mt Ainslie also make for excellent mountain biking apparently, and the coast is only two and a half hours away if you hanker for a weekend on the beach.

In Australia, amaysim have been particularly good value although I only discovered their existence after considerable Internet research. A $10 purchase in-store sim card purchase gave us 1GB of data valid for 30 days plus $10 of pre-pay phone credit (90 day expiry). The network is provided by Optus, in common with most of the cheap prepaid sim offerings. There were a couple of issues though which I document here for future travellers.

• We bought the sim card in a Seven-Eleven. The website claims you can buy them in post offices but the one we tried did not stock it so the availability might not be great. The same pack contains a sim that may be used with either the normal or micro sim formats.
• Online activation claimed to work but actually failed because of my non-Australian address and credit card. You must call them to get your $10 purchase converted to a data plan. I have not tried to top up the credit yet but it makes me think that credit card top ups might be difficult. Buying vouchers works around this, but see the note above on availability.
• The sim we bought has been used in multiple devices. I can report that despite rumours to the contrary, a sync with iTunes is not required to change the provider on an iPhone (at least on iOS5). However some devices could not access the Internet until the APN had been set manually to “Internet”, others just worked, for reasons I have yet to figure out.

Having come to snorkel we also thoroughly enjoyed the inland expedition to Cheow Lan Lake. The highlight of this was a trip on the lake in a long-tail boat which gave us a close up view of the imposing limestone islands that rose vertically up out of the water and towered over our little boat. The limestone had beautiful red colouring too, complimented by the green of the trees clinging to a precarious life on a sheer vertical wall of cliff and overhanging the water. Some of the islands have developed cave systems and we visited one which had spectacular stalactite and stalagmite formations, the iron giving them a rich red colour that invited comparison to the marble cathedrals of Italy.

Although we were only in a small part of Thailand for a few days, we really enjoyed our stay. Thai people were universally friendly and genuinely welcoming of tourists. The absence of pushy street salesmen that are commonly found in tourist areas the world over was also very pleasant—I look forward to returning.

The ACL does not appear in the Finder, but can be seen using ls -le:

0: group:everyone deny write,delete,append,writeattr,writeextattr,chown

and also metadata: com.apple.metadata:_kTimeMachineNewestSnapshot 50

The ACL can be removed using chmod -a #n filename where n is replaced by the number at the front of the ACL description (0 in this case). Applying it recursively is possible but potentially dangerous¹ unless you know this is the only ACL applied to the files in the directory. The metadata can be removed using xattr, like this:
xattr -d com.apple.metadata filename

1. and consequently left as an exercise to the reader [back]

Londoners enjoy a glorious October day in the V&A garden.

Sometimes you find photographs in the most unexpected places.

1. Create the file /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd as described in the standard docs, i.e. at least one line containing:
   server username:password
   and set the permissions using sudo chmod 600 /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd.
2. Make the db version used by postfix: sudo postmap /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd (the new file will inherit the permissions of the original file).
3. If you have upgraded from a previous version of OS X, particularly if you modified your postfix configs, follow the advice in the section below before continuing.
4. To tell postfix to use authenticated SMTP, add the following lines to /etc/postfix/main.cf:
   
mydomain = <<your.mail.domain>>
mydomain_fallback = localhost
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

   If your domain’s MX records do not specify your relayhost then you must also set the relayhost line.
5. postfix on OS X runs “on demand” so there is no need to instruct it to reload its configuration. The log file is in the standard UNIX location, /var/log/mail.log.

Upgrading from Snow Leopard

I had previously had this postfix setup working under Snow Leopard, and the upgrade process appeared to have preserved my configuration settings so I was surprised to see that after upgrading to Lion, my smarthost was not accepting mail.

Examining the files in /etc/postfix I noticed that in addition to my customised main.cf there was also a file called main.cf.default which was modified the date I had upgraded to Lion. Comparing the two files showed a number of subtle differences but after being unable to determine why postfix was not authenticating to my upstream server, I decided to copy it over my customised main.cf and re-apply my changes.

Having done this, the mailq command gave me the following error:
postfix[17922]: fatal: bad string length 0 < 1: setgid_group =
Setting setgid_group = _postdrop in main.cf fixed that but then I hit another error:
fatal: file /etc/postfix/main.cf: parameter mail_owner: user postfix has same user ID as _postfix
Resolving this required me to change the value of mail_owner from postfix to _postfix but I don’t know if this is a bug in Apple’s supplied main.cf or an artefact of my user and group information evolving from a 10.6 install to 10.7.

Since we had arrived directly after breakfast, we decided to delay walking the mile down hill to the lake itself and first take in the views from Orrest Head. Unfortunately the weather was not on our side and while the many different shades of grey-coloured clouds over the lake provided atmospheric views, the wind blew showers of rain at us frequently enough that we were not encouraged to linger at the top. The helpful lady in the tourist information had recommended an extended walk from Orrest Head so with the indomitable spirit of people who got up early and will enjoy their holiday in spite of the weather, we struck out over grazing land divided by picture postcard dry stone walls to reach the Lakeland Horticultural Society’s Holehird Gardens. The rain did not last and even I thought the garden was pretty impressive for its range of flora and colour.

Retracing our steps it did not seem long before we were back in the town of Windermere and warming ourselves up on some proper comfort food at Lazy Daisy’s café. Windermere was much less touristy than I was expecting, even for a working Thursday, although later I realised that this was probably due to it still being another mile from the lakeside! The lakeside itself was overrun by SAGA coach parties as expected, but there were some very quiet walking paths which quickly took us away from the hubbub to some pretty spots such as the Sheriff’s Walk, Cockshott point and Queen Adelaide’s hill.