Technology

I’ve decided to terminate my mobile phone service with Telstra because I can’t get decent reception any where near my house with them. The only service I know that works very well in my area is Optus, so I thought, okay, I’ll swap and take ye olde number with me because I can actually remember it now and don’t think I can handle a different one.

You can see where this is going can’t you?

I was in the Optus stop on Saturday afternoon, the servers they were trying to set up my account through went “AAAARRGGGGH!!!!” and took forever. Finally all went through, and was told all would be working on new phone with old number in 2 hours. It has now been almost a week. Apparently there have been some problems with the info that was submitted to set up my account. Then after many unnecessary phone callls to the Optus shop and the customer service center, later found out that they’re having technical problems porting my number.

FUCKING PORT THIS OPTUS!!!! (INSERT MIDDLE FINGER STICK UPPAGE).

The saga continues…

Don Park puts the semantic back into the semantic web — mark things up willy-nilly and make sense of them afterwards

The wide spread of unsolicited e-mails is leading publishers and site owners towards subscription-based RSS. People just do not subscribe to free e-mail newsletters any more, making a broad assumption that anyone offering them would be a spammer

Soon, the way you use your mouse could help prove who you are. Scientists have found a way for people to sign their name online using a mouse instead of a pen. The technology, based on the research from Queen Mary College, University of London by Peter McOwan, uses a neural network to pick out the unique features of the way that someone uses a mouse

A genuine, flexible, flapping-capable winged aircraft, or ornithopter, has been produced by the University of Toronto‘s Institute for Aerospace Studies and non-profit research institute, SRI International

Picture-messaging phones may be about to get a whole lot more intrusive. Thanks to a novel way to make a thin sheet of a piezoelectric ceramic material work like an ultra-cheap micromotor, mobile phone cameras should soon be able to zoom and focus with the same precision as the autofocusing lenses used in expensive stills cameras

The popular Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera officially launched its English Web site, five months after hackers brought down a temporary site at the height of the Iraq war

Mac OS X browser smackdown.

So far I’ve only skimmed this article quickly and checked out the comparison charts, but this looks to be quite a solid article comparing the pros and cons of the 9 browsers available for us OS X users.

And the winner according to this article is…

I rebooted the computer today and it refused to power up again. Half an hour of unplugging, replugging, removal and replacement of box panels and much swearing later — all while working under a desk, amid a rat’s nest of cables with a Husky standing on my chest — I discovered the problem. When the Palm is sucking power through its USB cable, there’s not enough juice to power up the box. And conversely, the box tries to draw power from the PDA, so flat batteries on the Palm.

Probably worth noting that I’ve had little to do with USB until recently, as instead of the usual array of USB friendly peripherals I opted for the SCSI versions instead. And I’ve never had the Palm connected to the box when I’ve had to reboot.

After this encounter with the pitfalls of USB, I’m quite glad I opted for SCSI for the hard core peripherals instead.

Japan, China and South Korea plan to develop an original operating system in a bid to challenge the domination of Microsoft Windows. Microsoft has declared the strategy unfair

Microsoft has told the W3C that it’s considering making changes to Internet Explorer in light of a recent ruling against the company in a patent infringement lawsuit

A few weeks ago, MIT graduate student Shan Sinha cancelled his broadband Internet service. Now his Net connection comes through the chimney. From a computer in the living room of his Cambridge apartment, a few blocks from the MIT campus, a cable goes into the fireplace up to the roof, where it is attached to an antenna. From there, data packets hop to another roof-mounted antenna at a nearby student’s apartment. That way, from roof to roof in multiple hops, Sinha’s data packets finally reach a gateway — a computer connected to the fixed Internet — at MIT’s computer science building

The difficult part about making your own liquid motion lamp is, of course, the motion

RSA Security is developing a ‘blocker’ tag that disrupts RFID tag transmissions, protecting a person’s privacy from those who would abuse RFID technology