The kerfuffle over Bob Brown‘s heckling of the President is by no means over. The speaker Neil Andrew wants to find someone to punish for the sin of letting the world see what actually happened in the Australian Parliament
Symantec has been unable to resolve a glitch that is stopping some users activating its latest antivirus software, and says it doesn’t know when a fix will be available
Emily the Strange just got a whole lot cooler with these new tees which I’m giving some VERY serious consideration on purchasing.
This little number is a gorgeous homage to Sonic Youths’ “Goo” album cover.
And this piece of wearable genius depicts a gloriously Edward Gore-ian type scene from his book, The Gashlycrumb Tinies.
There’s Movabletype plugins, manual configuration and external services available for creating blogrolls, but they all create far too big a footprint when you’re link happy. I wanted something a little more compact, a random link list of favourite URLs no more than five or six items long.
So I put the idea to sbszine who came up with a nifty little javascript that creates the list of links by randomly pulling one out of each category group. Very nice.
Dave Winer finds truth lies in the middle, after reading a recent I, Cringely Windows vs Linux diatribe.
Reality lies somewhere between Cringely and Ballmer and Linus. How about this. Both guys (Ballmer and Torvalds) make really shitty software. Microsoft, after decades of Windows development still can’t make a robust operating system that a normal person can use. And Linux ships with every security feature wide open. An end user who actually installed it (an amazing accomplishment in itself) would end up (instantly) hosting a playground for script kiddies everywhere. And the user interface of Linux sucks. Windows isn’t totally terrible. It’s a huge embarassment that with many billions of dollars, dozens of years, and billions of man-hours, this is the best the human species can produce.
Smithsonian naturalist and photographer Kjell Sandved one day found a butterfly with a silvery, gleaming letter ‘F’ woven into the tapestry of its wings. Having found one letter of the alphabet, he wondered whether there might be others butterflies flying around with letters on their wings. His butterfly alphabet quest would take him 24 years
Some moron from the US propaganda machine has ripped off the very well written, girl on the street blog, Baghdad Burning
The White House web site’s use of its robots.txt file to disable search engines from crawling certain material is an exercise in historical revisionism. Many excluded items in the robots.txt file involve mentions of Iraq, possibly to prevent people from finding changes to past statements and information when archived elsewhere
The Anti-Spam Research Group of the Internet Research Task Force early this month formed a subcommittee to hammer out differences between a number of competing protocols that all aim to do the same thing: verify that e-mail senders are who they say they are
A company accused of sending unsolicited bulk email was fined US$2 million, the first such ruling under California’s anti-spam law. PW Marketing LLC and its owners, Paul Willis and Claudia Griffin, were also banned from owning, managing, or holding an economic interest in any company that advertises over the internet without first notifying the attorney general. The injunction will remain in place for 10 years
A Sotheby‘s auction next month will include around 600 books, mainly on witchcraft and the occult: a tiny part of the vast library of the late artist Robert Lenkiewicz.
The collection includes many rarities such as a first edition Malleus Maleficarum and a 17th century spotter’s guide to witches and demons, by Joseph Glanvill.
His Saducismus Triumphatus was a desperate attempt to convince sceptics that ghosts and demons were all too real, and included the first-hand evidence of one Elizabeth Styles that the devil had appeared to her in the shape of a handsome Man and after of a black Dog. Then he promised her money, and that she should live gallantly, and have the pleasure of the world for 12 years, if she would with her blood sign his paper….
The Gemini, described by inventor Robert Leeds as the world’s first underwater sports car, is a personal submersible that will set you back US$825,000. However, the submarine only goes about five knots, so speed is not its primary focus. It can handle three people for three days at depths of up to 50 metres
The latest offering of Mandrake‘s distribution, 9.2, has been found to not only be incompatible with some LG CD-ROM drives, but to destroy them during the installation process. Mandrake have posted information on their errata page. Along with over 350MB of updates within a week of release, it’s not been a good start for this latest release
The Complete Far Side has been released, featuring over 4,000 cartoons, including 19 Larson made after retirement, letters from readers, and more packed into 1,250 pages in two hardcover books boxed as a set. My life is complete.
Even though it comes with a hefty price tag, it’s still cheaper to buy it in the US and ship it home yourself. Australian book stores suck.
The Motion Picture Association and APRA have commissioned a report from Allen Consulting into the effects of extending Australian copyright from life plus 50 years to life plus 70 years. This forms the MPA and APRA’s contribution to US-Australian free trade negotiations, currently underway. The report recommends that copyright terms should be extended. An extension of copyright would not be in Australia’s interest. Some would argue that it is not in anyone’s interest. Projects such as Project Gutenberg of Australia would be adversely affected by such an extension. Perhaps now is to time to write to your Member of Parliament, asking them to oppose any extension of copyright or patents, and shore up whatever resistance there is to an extension of IP in Australia
Howard does jingoistic nationalism well. He clutches sports people to his breast. He honours our war dead and the Bali victims by affirming our core values, yet he casually throws them away, even in our own Parliament, to please disrespectful foreign guests
More than seven years after British Rail was abolished, the Government took a large step towards the renationalisation of the network last night by allowing the state-backed Network Rail to take all track maintenance back in-house. The news came on the day that one of the main rail contractors was accused of falsifying records. It is the most significant sign yet that the privatisation drawn up by the Conservative government and refined by Labour has been a failure
Search engine Google, owner of one of the most powerful brands on the internet, is now close to floating its shares for the first time
The Norman Lindsay Gallery held their Celtic Festival today and I went along to help with spinning demonstrations, mostly because I’ve never been their before.
It started raining on the trip up the mountains and was pretty heavy by the time we hit the turn off at Faulconbridge. That was when I noticed what I thought was blossoms across the lawn that had been knocked off the tree by the heavy rain. I wasn’t flowers, it was hail.
Got to the gallery and managed to find the other member of our group, who’d managed to get the gazebo up before more hail hit and was sheltering under it. I’ve heard the term hail the size of golf balls, but this is the first time I’ve seen it.
Needless to say we decided to forego spinning in the rain, but did have the chance to have a look around the grounds and gallery. Not a fan of Norman Lindsay’s paintings and sketches, but I do like his sculpture and there’s a lot of it in the grounds.
Nice place and, under better circumstances, it would have been a great day out. If you are in the area and a fan of Norman Lindsay it’s well worth dropping by.
With the rise of Mini-ITX motherboards and their usefulness for modding small household objects into PCs has resulted in hobbyists across Europe, the United States and the Far East stuffing the works of personal computers into toasters, humidors, biscuit tins, lampshades, even a plush ET doll
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