Bevan Slattery, of Pipe Networks, has posted this tonight on whirlpool attacking both major political parties and raising some very good points as to why Australia should not go with a FTTN (Fiber To The Node) network.

Whirlpool.net.au
Pipenetworks - ASX/Media Release

Looks like some idiot is doing a spam campaign trying to promote Ron Paul, some US candidate for congress. Personally I couldn't give a rats ass about an election in The United States of America, but if a spammer is going to irritate me about this then can they please spam me about a candidate that matters for me in the Australian federal election.

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This post on Jon Lech Johansen’s blog (AKA DVD John), just about sums Apple up.

"It’s evident that Apple is well on its way to become one of the most consumer hostile tech companies"

And as I say myself, Apple, built by wankers, for wankers. Although I can't confirm that any staff member at Apple is a wanker, the behavior of Apple stands for itself.

Think Closed

So I was searching around the net as I do and I came across this blog post. Apparently this guy, just to prove that the Earth was round to his little sister, built a a remotely controlled camera system attached to a helium balloon and has successfully returned it to the ground with pictures and video. It's quiet an achievement for do it yourself electronics.

High ALititude Object

This is so funny, thank you designers in Japan for your poor yet hilarious design mistake.

Pikachu Vagina

A Melbourne University PhD student has developed a method that could see DSL services able to deliver speeds up to 240 Mbit/s. Dr John Papandriopoulos, who is currently applying for patents in both Australia and the United States, has won Melbourne University's top academic prize (Chancellor's Prize for Excellence in a PhD). Dr John Papandriopoulos research essentially was into using mathematic modeling to reduce telephone line crosstalk, which plagues DSL services and slows them down to their current speeds between 1 Mbit/s and 24Mbit/s.

When accounting software provider, 2Clix launched into legal action over comments made about its products on the popular Australian broadband forum, Whirlpool the public backlash was quick and brutal, in what could be the final chapter of 2Clix’s very public history the company is on the verge of appointing an administrator to go into liquidation.

Source - IDM

A new version of Firefox is out, it's mostly just security fixes, but it now has Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) Support and some New Languages.

Firefox

The term magic number also refers to the bad programming practice of using numbers directly in source code without explanation. In most cases this makes programs harder to read, understand, and maintain. Although most guides make an exception for the numbers zero and one, it is a good idea to define all other numbers in code as named constants.

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It was drawn to my attention today that it can be a real bitch to run this old DOS games and other DOS applications under modern Microsoft Windows, thus I thought I would dump this guide on everyone.

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It appears as though we may have a listing of who is going to play the rolls in Star Trek XI.

Chris Pine as James (Jim) Kirk [Not Confirmed at this point]
John Cho as Hikaru Sulu
Simon Pegg as Montgomery Scott
Anton Yelchin as Pavel Chekov
Zachary Quinto as Young Spock
Leonard Nimoy as Older Spock
Zoe Saldan as Uhura
Eric Bana as the villain character (Nero)

I seen this item on TechRepublic, one of the many email subscriptions I find actually usefully and informative. This blog article talks about some generalizations about IT people in an attempt to help IT Managers understand the nerds they have working for them and how they think. Although the entry calls them IT Pros, I don't believe in being that politically correct when I know myself I'm one of these people being managed. (A nerd, an introvert, a logical thinker, a problem solver, and well I try to be technically creative)

Four Things You Should Know About Your IT Technical Staff

Tuesday (Well Wednesday here in Australia) is the day that Microsoft releases their updates. The usual rundown is available from Microsoft's site. For convenience I have provided a link Here

Microsoft Security Bulletin Summary for October 2007

Update
The New Brainless Morons At Fox keep deleting the video from YouTube even though it clearly promotes their product for free.

Dumb Dumb Dumb Dumb Dumb!

Don't want to think about how to vote at the next Australian Federal Election, use the Vote-a-matic to make your choice. Simply select your choice from the multiple choice question provided and the Vote-a-matic will tell you who you should vote for based on your answers.

Vote-a-matic

Vote-a-matic is is created by News.com.au

Whirlpool has received the Notice of Discontinuance in regards to the court case.

2Clix Claims Case Withdrawal
2Clix sues Whirlpool founder

It appears as though those wonderful spammers who brought use the Google "I'm feeling lucky" url abuse, have now found a new site to abuse, Verisign. Basically what the spammers are now doing is using the site search feature on Verisign's website to mask their urls. All they have to do is place their address at the end of "http://search.verisign.com/cs.html?url=http://www.spamsite.com/" and it is enough to mask their site. I don't think it will be long before the phishers pick up on this one.

I've also noticed that some casino site is now using the Google "I'm feeling lucky" abuse with the search phrase ""million megabet from casino online" Magic Jackpot!"

My previous post about the Google abuse has been updated to reflect the new phrase.



UPDATE
Verisign have now blocked this re-direct, anyone trying to use it will now be redirected to the Verisign site search. Thank You Versign for taking positive action.

Just for fun I've added emoticons to my site, for both user comments & articles. The following table lists each emoticon and the text that triggers it:

I was browsing around randomly and I found a very strange government website in Australia, Toilet Map. At first I was skeptical as to if it was a real site but low and behold it is exactly what it says it is, a directory of public toilets in Australia.

Apparently Microsoft Excel 2007 can't do it's times tables. Microsoft employee David Gainer, has posted on the Excel Blog that when computer users try to get Excel 2007 to multiply some numbers, and the result was 65535, Excel would incorrectly display 100000. Gainer said Excel makes mistakes multiplying 77.1 by 850, 10.2 by 6425 and 20.4 by 3212.5. Gainer said the bug is limited to six numbers from 65534.99999999995 to 65535, and six numbers from 65535.99999999995 to 65536.

Microsoft is currently trying to address this problem.

UPDATE
Microsoft has now addressed this problem with a patch
See the Blog entry Here