Conroy - Super Villian

Australian Senator Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communication and the Digital Economy won the Internet Villian of the Year Award at the 11th Annual Internet Industry Awards by the Internet Service Providers Association in London this week. Check out the story on iTWire.

Congratulations Mr Conroy, the entire world has formally recognized your Internet filtering scheme as the worst thing that's happend to the Internet ever. Well done!

Parties, Maps and the Flu

We went to Brisbane on the weekend to attend Jemma and Nick's engagement party. We took the X-90 down for the drive, the first time I've taken the little Suziki for such a long trip. It handled really well, although the seats stop being comfortable after about three or four hours.

The party was great! We caught up with a lot of Cilla's family and got to meet some of Nick's relatives which was really good. Nick's clan seems like a top bunch. We're looking forward to catching up with most of Cilla's family again at Xmas. Nick show me his new iPhone 3G S which is a very tidy bit of gear. iPhone is a bit smaller than I thought it would be. I really really really want one...

We had a few days free to do whatever and we were trying to think of who we know near there to drop in and visit. The Gilberts are pretty much just across the NSW border, and Mick and Anna aren't far away in Dalby, but the choice was made for us when Cilla woke up with a cough and the sniffles. I'm sure no-one want's a visit from someone with the flu (especially with a house full of kids) so we headed home.

We did drop in to Maryborough to stretch our legs and give our arses a rest, where we caught up with Reid and met his Grandmother Beryl. She didn't like my long hair at all and didn't hesitate to tell me so. She's a funny old dear. She cooked us up a little pizza and sent us on our way.

It was nice to crash in our own bed after a long trip but we were both sick as dogs. Of course there was that little voice at the back of our heads saying "...it could be swine influenza..." so on Monday we gave Queensland Health a call and let them know we had the flu. They interviewed me over the phone and asked me lots of question along the lines of "are you dying?" and "are you dead yet?" and finally said it was likely just normal people flu and I should just go see a doctor.

Our regular doctor was booked out so we booked in at another medical center. And what a wanker we ended up with! He quizzed us about smoking and then blamed that on why we were sick and then told Cilla, who works at a cafe at an airport that she'd be ready for work in two days. Knowing the risk of taking the flu into a cafe at an airport, she asked to have until Friday, but the doctor refused saying she can go back to work on Wednesday. So without a medical certificate from the doctor, Cilla has been forced to go to work before she's recovered.

And get this! The antibiotic that this doctor prescribed came with a "Consumer Medicine Information" sheet which says:

"Doxyhexal is an antibiotic and belongs to a group of medicines called tetracyclines... Tetracyclines will not work agains viral infections such as colds or flu."

So what the fuck is up with this doctor? To the untrained eye, it looks like he has no idea of what he's doing. To the conspiracy minded it looks like he's trying to spread the flu as far and wide as possible. Perhaps he's just an anti-smoking campaigner posing to be a medical practitioner. Whatever his problem is, he does nothing to promote trust in his industry.

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Other news. Google have added Real Estate search to Google Maps. Try it out like this.

1. Visit maps.google.com.au
2. Type "real estate" into the search box
3. Click the "Search Maps" button
4. Click "Real estate on Google Maps" link in the left sidebar of the webpage - it has a little blue house icon beside it.

Now you should have lots of little red dots all over the map. These are properties for sale or rent. You can narrow the search field using the options in the side bar and you'll see dot's disappear as you do. This is a very neat tool and an extremely practical use of Google Maps.

Gotta love Google!

Who are the targets?

Senator Conroy and his Internet censorship goons have, until recently, been selling their compulsory filter idea as a way of protecting young Australians from kiddy porn, but if Conroy is allowed to implement his Great Barrier Firewall, he gives our federal government a filter that lets them block any information they deem unsuitable for your viewing.

Let me stress that point.

If we ALLOW our Federal Government to force this censorship scheme on us, it lets THEM decide what sites are not suitable for YOU to look at, download or purchase. They will have unprecedented contral over your access to information and what you are able to purchase because, as they have since revealed, the scope of their censorship goes far beyond blocking unsuitable porn.

Todays rant is inspired by articles in the news recently describing how Conroy already plans to expand the scope of his Internet filter to block out any websites that sell or allow you to download computer games that fall outside the MA15+ rating given by the Australian Film and Literature Classification Board. Australia is the only western country in the world that doesn't have an R18+ rating for computer games!

Do any of my readers play Second Life? Be prepared to kiss that little diversion goodbye - anything that lets it's players get creative and make whatever they want is definitely going to fall outside our ratings system!

Fallout 3 was banned in Australia for depicting drug use until a censored version was released.

Most of the GTA games have been banned in Australia because they depicted sex scenes. Censored versions have since been released.

F.E.A.R. 2 was banned because it was too violent. The publishers appealed the decision and it was reclassified as MA15+.

There is quite a list of games banned in Australia.

Basically, computer games get refused classification (and subsequently banned) because of drug use, sex scenes and violence - the very same reasons we have an R18+ rating for video and film releases.

The Interactive Entertainment Association of Australia (IEAA) recently conducted a survey revealing that the average age of the Australian gamer is thirty years old. Not really surprising considering the average price of a latest generation gaming console or games-capable PC tends to be out of reach of most pocket money budgets. So we know that the people buying games are - on average - adults. The same adults that can rent or purchase a whole range of R18+ movies depicting all kinds of drug use, sex and violence. In some places in Australia, these same adults are legally allowed to purchase X rated material. Yet when it comes to gamers, we are treated by our Government as children no matter what our age.

Savvy gamers in the past have simply ordered their game from a civilized country like New Zealand, a country like every other western country in the world that has an R18+ rating for their games, allowing adults to enjoy their games as they were meant to be.

Our very own Internet Villain Award Nominee, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy plans to put a stop to all that. His blacklist will now include any sites that provide access to games that have been refused classification in Australia. This means that any site that sells R18+ games will be blocked even if you wanted to buy a PG13 rated game.

And even if you think this is okay, even if you reckon gamers should wait until our Government to listen to the thousands of Aussie gamers crying out for a fair rating system for our games, you'd be naive to think that Conroys Internet Censorship scheme will stop at blocking computer games. The blacklist that blocks these 'unacceptable sites' can be added to at a whim. If the Government don't want you to see it, they can put it on their secret blacklist and you lose access to it just as if the owner of the site had pulled it down.

I have put a widget on the side bar of my blog where you can sign a petition at GetUp! who have had some success in promoting awareness about this censorship situation. This censorship scheme of Senator Stephen Conroy's has the potential to destroy the freedom we have online in ways that you won't realize until it's gone. It will give our Government the power to block your access to anything - independent news websites, entertainment sites, community networking sites, even blogs like mine could end up being blocked.

We have already seen the blacklist block legitimate business sites with the Queensland dentist who was added to the blacklist without any warning or explanation, costing them business because the site was down, costing them service and maintenance trying to figure out why their site wasn't working, and no, he will not be getting compensation.

A point I'd like to make here is that our current rating system was designed to apply to movies, films, television shows and also printed media and radio broadcasts. When applied to media, this kind of rating system makes sense. You can be assured that when you hire a DVD rated PG13 that your young teenager should be able to handle the content and you can make informed decisions on watching R rated or X rated content.

But, and this is a very big 'BUT', the Internet is not a one-way media. It is a communication system in which information is sent both to you and by you. Censoring the Internet is like censoring your telephone. It is like censoring your personal mail. It is taking away your access to information. It is removing any option to you to choose to view R rated or X rated material. It is removing your freedom of choice.

Don't let this happen. Sign a petition. Discuss the issue with your friends. Write about it on Facebook. Let Stephen Conroy and his pals know that we are Australian adults and we can choose for ourselves what we watch, what we listen to and what we play. We grown ups now, we like our freedom and we can decide for ourselves thank you very much.

Google Wave

Google have announced new technology called Wave. They say that they asked themselves one question.

"What would e-mail be like if it were invented today?"

As usual, Google have not failed to impress. After watching the keynote on their homepage on what we can expect to be able to do with Wave once it's released, I am excited. It marries Instant Messaging style chat to e-mail style conversations to forum style discussions with wiki style editing options... and much more than that!

Here are a few points in the video that I'd like to list that I'm really looking forward to.

• Character-by-character chat.

No longer do you sit and wait while you stare at the notice "Fred is typing...". Instead, you see Fred's message as he's typing it, so you can be already formulating your reply. If you begin typing your reply before he's finished, he can see you doing so, character by character as you type.

• Photo (and other rich content) sharing.

Something that is difficult to do with online photo albums today is allowing many people to add to a single collection. Wave makes it really easy to share photos and ideas under a single topic for everyone to see and add to. For example, your young child has a birthday party and you post some fun pics on a wave to share with everyone who was at the party, and other people could add photos that they took to the same collection.

Which brings us to

• Collaboration

This system really allows for groups of people to work on one thing all at once. The character-by-character nature of the communication means that many people can be editing the same document at once because you see everyone's changes and additions as they're making them.

• Spell Checker

They also demonstrated a new spell checker that is actually context sensitive. It can fix those mistakes that most spell checkers miss, like the difference between to and too, or there, their and they're. This is technology that draws upon Google's vast amounts of information at their disposal, by creating a massive database on language usage and how sentences are formed and what people are talking about. If information is power, then this is an example of an enormous amount of power being used for the common good of the Citizens of Earth... but wait, they're about to prove that spelling and grammar are not the limit of their power...

• Language Translator

I was just completely blown away when they demonstrated this. The translator supports forty different languages and can translate between any two of them. It, like everything else, is character-by-character, so as your French acquaintance is typing you can see their text appear as they type it, with the translation appearing below, as they type.

So while Microsoft are playing a fanfare for the launch of Bing, the search tool that censors your results but has a pretty picture behind it, Google are coming up with the next big thing.

Remember the original question? "What would e-mail be like if it were invented today?" One of the things that makes the forty-odd year old e-mail standard so successful is that it remains an Open Standard, meaning that anyone can write an e-mail program, run their own e-mail server and still send and receive e-mail with anyone in the world, regardless of what software or server they are using. This is the benefit of using Open Standards so Google are releasing Wave as an Open Standard too, allowing anyone to create clients, extensions and add-ons that take advantage of the new Wave protocol.

This is what Google reckon e-mail should be like, and I like it!

Let's see, what's new?

Well, Windows 7 is landing with a big splash. It hasn't even been released yet and already the NSW Dept of Education is installing it on student laptops. Not surprisingly, the students are liking it. It's actually quite good. I've had Windows 7 loaded up on my iMac with Bootcamp for a while now and it seems to work really well. It doesn't deliberately go out of it's way to piss me off like Vista did, although it has still inherited many of the classic faults of the Windows Operating System.

By loading up Windows 7 on my computer I agreed to a non-disclosure agreement which prevents me from discussing my Windows 7 experience with anyone but Microsoft, which is why I haven't blogged for a while. So I'm not going to tell you any more about it - except that it's the best Windows OS I've ever used and is easily as good (in terms of OS features, security and ease-of-use) as the previous version of Mac OS.

If you want to try out Windows 7 visit the official Microsoft Download page and you can try it for free until July 2010. You'll need a "Microsoft Account" to acces it. A Hotmail/Live/MSN account... y'know, one of those... if you use Microsoft/MSN/Windows/Live Messenger, that's the account you'll need. I wish they'd just settle on one branding!

Look out! Here comes another one! Bing!

This picture is an accurate representation of what Google has done to Microsoft's previous forays into online search. Google is so successful at online search that the two words are interchangeable. People don't search for something anymore, they Google it.

If we can give Microsoft credit for anything though, it's that they just don't give up. Enter Bing, Microsoft's latest brand sporting an uncharacteristically creative name which they hope will be the search engine of choice for Netizens of the future. I reckon Google are already preparing the backswing for this one.

Essential Leopard Software.

I've been trying out lots of software on my iMac to see what works best for me. Here is a list of things I've installed to make the Mac computing experience easier.

1. Logitech Control Center.

Support for Logitech keyboards and mice. The one thing that Apple makes that I can't stand is that pathetic excuse for a mouse. Sure, it's got a nice multi-directional scrolling ball thing but it only has one button which - when you go to play a game - is absolutely useless. And before anyone tells me that it can be configured so it can detect right or left click, it doesn't change the fact that the mouse physically only has one button. Go ahead, grab your Mighty Mouse. Hold down the left button and then click the right button. You can't can you? Because the one and only physical button is already being held down. Most useless mouse ever. So I use a decent Logitech wired optical mouse and the Mighty Mouse gets to sit in the drawer as a spare if I ever get that desperate.

2. Flip4Mac WMV.

This is Microsoft software. It adds Windows Media support to Quicktime so you can watch .wmv and listen to .wma files as well as watch Windows streaming media on the web. Typical of Microsoft, they have a couple of different versions of the same thing with different levels of functionality and price. Stick with the free one. The alternative is to get Windows Media Player for Mac and no-one wants to do that!

3. Perian.

Perian is known as the swiss-army knife of QuickTime components. Basically it adds support to your Mac for lots of different video and audio formats allowing these files to be used in your other Mac software.

4. Growl.

This is notification software and is very popular. It links into the Mac OS framework to deliver notifications of software events that happen on your computer like letting you know when someone comes online or when your torrent has finished downloading. With a bit of extra fiddling, you can install the Hardware Growler which comes with it. Then it will monitor your computer hardware which provides information about your network, notifies you when you plug something into the computer or if a disk has been mounted or ejected.

5. MacFUSE and NTFS-3G.

It really does suck when your Windows using friend comes around with their external hard drive to find that your Mac won't even read what's on there. This solution comes in two parts.

1. Part one is the installation of MacFUSE which is written by Google. It establishes a mechanism within OS X that allows it to connect with non-native filesystems. Simply put, with this installed, you can 'teach' your Mac to read disks that are not formatted for Mac.
2. The second part is the installation of the NTFS-3G driver. This is the bit that 'teaches' your Mac to read Windows formatted NTFS disks.

It took me a while to get this working the first time but that was on the Mac Mini about a year ago. The latest versions were easy to install. One, then the other. Done. I can read all my mates external hard drives now. For all those using Boot Camp, this lets you read and write to your Windows drive too, but that may screw up your Windows install... like I care about Windows anymore...

6. Safari 4.

At the time of writing this post, all Macs come with a web browser called Safari but currently you get Safari 3 which, while it's a capable web browser and it's quite quick, it doesn't shape up too well against most of the competition. Safari 4 is still in beta but is a vast improvement over it's predecessor, integrating the tab bar and the title bar together to give you more space for the pages your looking at and the Top Sites feature that shows all the sites you visit the most on one screen with thumbnails so you can easily recognize the site you want to go to.

7. UnRarX.

Leopard has support for most compression types built in including the most popular - ZIP, but some of the archives we download are compressed in a RAR file. To open these, I use UnRarX. This utility won't add full RAR support to your Mac, it does nothing but decompress RAR files. It's small, light and does the job.

Back to Mac!

The new iMac arrived. Doesn't she look pretty?

Okay, lets get the specs out of the way...

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.93 GHz dual core CPU with 6MB L2 Cache.

4GB (2x2GB) 1066MHz DDR3.

1TB 7200rpm hard drive.

ATI Radeon HD 4850 with 512MB GDDR3 memory.

24" display @ 1920 x 1200.

That's the bits most want to know about, but I'll continue...

Built in:-

Firewire 800.

USB 2.0.

802.11a/b/g/n wireless networking.

Bluetooth 2.1.

10/100/1000BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet.

Optical digital audio.

Stereo speakers.

Microphone.

iSight camera.

8x DVD/CD burner.

IR Receiver.

It looks great and I was surprised at how quiet it is after using a PC that sounds like we have a concord in the room! Ahhh, the serenity...

I could go on, but I won't. Most of you already hear too much about me going on about Apple...

Later!

Facebook

Being the technology fan that I am, there are a few online services that I have come to really appreciate. Google is obviously at the top of the list with their search, mail and calendar firmly entrenched in my everyday life. I dislike MySpace because it always looks so cluttered and poorly formatted. There was an idea there, but it didn't really have a properly defined goal and seemed to lack direction.

My next foray into the social networking website scene involved Orkut, Google's own attempt at this growing market, but it didn't seem to work very well either. There is an awful lot of spam comments littered throughout the site making it quite an unpleasant place to visit.

I initially dismissed Facebook as another doomed-to-failure attempt at the social networking website genre and I didn't expect it to go very far, but when we really needed to find so people it amazed me at how efficiently I was able to track down and get in touch with them.

Earlier this year a friend of ours was involved in a terrible accident. When we initially heard about it we had very little information. Using Facebook, we were quickly able to track down friends of the people involved and by the end of the day we had made contact with several people we were able to share information with.

I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, as my regular reader will already know, and the fact that they have recently bought into Facebook is a little worrying. I've seen what happens to websites that get bought by Microsoft. HoTMaiL is a prime example of how Microsoft can screw up a perfectly good service website.

There is no doubt though, that Facebook is 90% crap. In fact the crap level is probably closer to 97 or 98%. It's filled with stupid surveys like: "Do you think your friend's mother's chiropractor is sexy?", "What are your top ten David Letterman Top Ten lists?" and "Rate my sports clothing company's sex appeal". Then there's those silly time-wasting games that go nowhere, although I do click through the Pirates! game. Anyone thinking of sending me a fish for my coral cove should be aware that I drained it months ago and anyone thinking of sending me a plant for my Lil' Green Patch should be aware that it's now nothing more than a big slab of concrete. I stopped accepting those silly gifts when some dude send me a virtual diamond ring! That worried me a bit.

Underneath the crap though is an excellent network that allows me to keep in touch with friends around the world. We keep in contact with our friends Kerry and Bevan who are travelling Europe for the next several months. They drop a little note on their Facebook page nearly every day and post photos of their trip. At the same time they keep up-to-date with everything that is happening back here in Australia. Another friend, Kaaren is in Thailand at the moment and she's keeping us informed of her adventures over there. My good friend Steve "The Drummer" recently got onto Facebook and immediately found and contacted members of his family over in England that he hasn't seen or spoken to in over a decade! It's allowed a level of communication among our family that we've never had before with every single member keeping in touch with everyone else with very little effort.

I like it. I like the way it keeps me in touch with everyone on my friends list. I like the way I can set it up to restrict my information to just people on my friends list. I like that people can find me, but when they do, they can see only my name and profile picture and nothing else until I confirm them as a friend. I like the way I can share photos and stories with all the people that I care about. This blog has been a great way to keep everyone updated on what I'm doing, but people have to come here to read it (unless you subscribe to it using an RSS feed reader like Google Reader). What makes Facebook work so well is that you only need to visit your own page because has all your friends posts already on it.

I'm a fan.

Preparations

Defrag finished last night sometime so it took approximately four full days to complete. The last fifty per-cent was obviously a lot quicker than the first. I analyzed the disk again with Microsoft Disk Defragmenter and it recommend that I defrag it!

I wonder if Microsoft plan to fix this problem in Windows 7? It doesn't look like it though.

Right now I have to finish the few jobs that are still on the computer and get it ready to live out its life in "server-tude".

Four days so far...

Defrag is at 42%.

Did I mention how much Windows sucks?

World Record Defrag Time

7:30am Tuesday morning. Defrag at 36%

The cyclone seems to have missed us. Pretty much zero rain for the whole time that the cyclone was off the coast. It was funny how most of the town went into panic mode, stocking up on supplies and fuel. The supermarkets were packed with people when Cilla went to do the normal weekly shop with lineups at the check-outs going all the way down the aisle. We heard similar stories from friends that went shopping at different times of the day, so it sounds like the shops had a good week this week. Nothing like fear to drive spending. Just the threat of a natural disaster is enough to open the coin purses of our economically challenged community.

It looks as though a lot of people have stocked up for nothing. The cyclone has missed us completely. It would have turn around completely and double back on itself to present any threat to us now.

We've had some nice cool, breezy and overcast days but it would've been nice to get some rain out of it.

Missed us

It's 4.30pm. The cyclone is keeping it's distance, moving parallel to the coast. We've had a windy day but we havn't had any rain at all.

Defrag is at 27%.

I ordered a new computer.

Thunderf00t rejects Atheism

Hamish approaches

-Image copyright of Bureau of Meteorology.

We're certainly not worried about being blown away. The cyclone seems to be staying off the coast but the Bureau of Meteorology are keeping the warning current for coastal regions between Yeppon and Hervey Bay. We didn't get any rain last night, although we did get 8mm the night before.

This weather makes for some refreshingly cool days though. Overcast skys with a good breeze make it pleasant to work outside.

It's twenty-to-ten and my defrag just clicked over to 21%. Damn Windows sucks!

Defrag & Blog

It's 11:14pm on Sunday night and Cyclone Hamish is knocking at our door. It's just started to rain and the wind is picking up. The cyclone warning on Weatherzone says that it should be off the coast of Gladstone by tomorrow afternoon but by then it should be down to a Category 3.

My computer has been the source and subject of some hostility over the last couple of days as it practically ground to a halt, taking forever to do even the simplest of tasks. I checked 'defrag' and was told that I should defrag my C: drive.

That was early yesterday morning. It's been 'defragging' for going on forty hours now. It's a 250GB HDD with 21% free space - and it's 17% done!

Windows just seems to get in my way when I try to use the computer to do stuff I want to do.

Did you know that OS X has built-in safeguards against fragmentation of data on the hard drive?

Every day of your life that you waste using Microsoft Windows is a day of your life wasted.