I spent about six months in the USA some time ago and in most respects really enjoyed myself. One of my favourite discoveries was a program on NPR called All Things Considered. This program as well as meeting some Americans for real did a lot to break down the perception that most Americans are thick-witted red necks.
For me, its things like NPR in America, ABC here in Australia and of course the BBC, that are symptons of a healthy democracy. If rights and freedoms are to be eroded, it's independant channels like these that will be the first against the firing squads.
ABC radio occasionally repeats All Things Considered, but it's scheduling has to fight with the sitting of parliment. I know which I'd rather listen too.
But the good news is it's online. And one of the stories today (which is yesterday for the USA) was about a guy called Pete Kistler and the company he has set up.
So the story goes, Pete Kistler went for a job he was suprised not to get, and later found out from a friend that the interviewers had googled him up and found a drug dealer by the same name, and got confused. (Doesn't that sound just a little incredible to you? It did to me.)
This story has been repeated to infinitum on the web by a bunch of parrots. But the NPR guy is not a parrot, he is a journalist, a real journalist, and he checked the facts.
And guess what, the whole story is a fake. No such Pete Kistler has been recorded in any jurisdiction. The stuff on the web was faked for any one who bothered to check the story online, which is as far as any parrots got if at all.
The story was created just to promote the company this bloke set up that offers a service that is supposed to do something about similar problems, starting at $1000 (USA) a year. It's the sort of story that ensured they got free advertising and promotion by all those parrots who loved a good story but didn't check their facts.
(And by the way in case your wondering I classify myself as a parrot too, I'm not a journalist).
The question left is would you trust your reputation protection to someone who resorts to fraud to promote himself and his business.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
The Buck For A Vote Scam
Just ask people who know me and they will tell you I complain about the government almost as much as I complain about SharePoint. But it's obviously not that bad because I've never actually done anything about it.
Well that stops today (well tonight anyway).
I've just read up on the new legislation that is about to be intrdoduced into the Australian Federal Parliment that will effectively give each member of parliment 33 cents per year for each vote they get in an election. That works out to be around $1 an election cycle.
For independant MPs, at least those who were independant at the time of the election, it goes straight to them. But for party MPs, it goes to the party, not the MP.
Normally corrupt governments are supposed to hand out dollars for votes. It takes an really corrupt government to think up an idea where it takes your vote, and your dollar too.
Just like in the USA which is dominated by the Republican vs. Democrat parties, or England's Labour vs. Conservative (and friends), Australian politics is dominated by the Labour vs. Liberal party. Well I should say Labour vs. Coalition because there are a handful of Nationals (read Country party) which doesn't mean much unless your from Queensland.
In the mix there are a handful of independants, I think 6 now, though 2 of those were not by choice being found out to be so crooked that each party has had to disown 1 member each. I want to stress the "found out" bit there. It's alright to be a crooked MP as long as your not found out, otherwise there would be a hell of a lot more independants.
And only a bunch of crooks could come up with this scheme and try and sell it as a good thing to the Australian public. And of course it's being endorsed by both parties. You don't get that sort of cooperation between the otherwise opposing political parties unless your talking about politician pay rises or political party exemption from things like the Privacy ACT or the Do Not Call Register.
And what's worse they are going to back date this thing 2 years, so the two main parties each earn themselves a $2 million windfall, just under 4 months out from the next federal election. Actually, since I think we have about 14 million registered voters, and voting is compulsary in Australia, I would have thought this should be a bit more.
Where was your mandate to do this? Mandate is a word politicians love to use when they are introducing unpopular or controversial polcies in their first years of office. I certainly never voted for this.
This has got me so frakking angry. If you don't watch Battlestar, then frakking is a rude thing that coal seam miners do to holes in the ground.
And with the current government party effectively in walking dead status, this is a perfect time for them to slip this sort of snouts in the trough legislation through. Keep your eye out for some more like this in the coming weeks.
A few, I dare say, marginal seat politicians have objected to this legislation, or voiced deep concerns. And sure they might try and claim the higher moral ground for a few news bites, but they are still going to take the money when it goes through.
And the worst thing about this one party is as bad as the other. Instead of Liberal and Labour you might as well call them butter and margarine. I can't taste the difference.
Take the issue which is commonly called "boat people" in this country. When in opposition Labour attacked the Liberal Government for lacking compasion, but when in power, took an exterme right position on the issue, more right than the previous government's position.
But don't get me wrong here, for every complaint I have of one party, I can identify an equal complaint with the other party. They both talk about how they serve the economy and forget the people who vote them in. Neither side has any real answers for the big issues.
And so all this is going to do is allow the party machine to drown out any idependant and original message with the continual party diatribe, even more than ever before.
Well I've never written to my local MP before, but now I will. If you support this policy then the other guy is going to get my vote. I'll write the same thing to whoever the other guy is and let them work out the conundrum between themselves.
Now the government is telling us, this is a good thing, It means that parties won't be influenced by big money, like in the USA, which is funny because most of the time they seem to be doing exactly what the USA is doing, like going to wars, locking people up in some bay, etc.
I think it's a little too late to be worried about big money. I mean, what do all you politicians do when your finished being politicians, you go and work for all those big money interests that you represented when you were in government.
And I include you in that list Mr Carr, touting yourself up as the next leader of federal Labour. What did you do when you stopped being Premiere of NSW (that's like a state governor for anyone in USA). You went and worked for the same financier that made a mint out of public works tollways you helped roll out while in government. I would expect this from the Liberals, because they are meant to represent business and facists, but people from Labour go and do exactly the same thing.
No one is fooled for a second that big money interests aren't already represented and well entrenched in our government. Just look at the ICAC investigation into Obeid, which gives us an idea of what is going on regularly. They don't need to worry about some $5,000 limit on donations, they just go around it.
Actually come to think of it, this absurd spin of how this is such a good thing, which they can barely deliver with a straight face, has made me change my mind.
The worst thing about this is that all that money is not going to be spent on getting the message out, it's just going to be spent on useless spin and attack ads. And for propping up the son's printing business or the wife's PR company.
So heres an idea. I'm guessing that an informal vote doesn't count towards this revenue. Since voting for one party is as bad as voting for the other, how about, just vote informally. Don't put numbers on the ballot sheet, just write in really big letters: "NOT GETTING MY DOLLAR".
I can't think of a better way to protest than to hit their wallet nerve. And it's not like my vote is doing any other good.
Well it's a thought.
Well that stops today (well tonight anyway).
I've just read up on the new legislation that is about to be intrdoduced into the Australian Federal Parliment that will effectively give each member of parliment 33 cents per year for each vote they get in an election. That works out to be around $1 an election cycle.
For independant MPs, at least those who were independant at the time of the election, it goes straight to them. But for party MPs, it goes to the party, not the MP.
Normally corrupt governments are supposed to hand out dollars for votes. It takes an really corrupt government to think up an idea where it takes your vote, and your dollar too.
Just like in the USA which is dominated by the Republican vs. Democrat parties, or England's Labour vs. Conservative (and friends), Australian politics is dominated by the Labour vs. Liberal party. Well I should say Labour vs. Coalition because there are a handful of Nationals (read Country party) which doesn't mean much unless your from Queensland.
In the mix there are a handful of independants, I think 6 now, though 2 of those were not by choice being found out to be so crooked that each party has had to disown 1 member each. I want to stress the "found out" bit there. It's alright to be a crooked MP as long as your not found out, otherwise there would be a hell of a lot more independants.
And only a bunch of crooks could come up with this scheme and try and sell it as a good thing to the Australian public. And of course it's being endorsed by both parties. You don't get that sort of cooperation between the otherwise opposing political parties unless your talking about politician pay rises or political party exemption from things like the Privacy ACT or the Do Not Call Register.
And what's worse they are going to back date this thing 2 years, so the two main parties each earn themselves a $2 million windfall, just under 4 months out from the next federal election. Actually, since I think we have about 14 million registered voters, and voting is compulsary in Australia, I would have thought this should be a bit more.
Where was your mandate to do this? Mandate is a word politicians love to use when they are introducing unpopular or controversial polcies in their first years of office. I certainly never voted for this.
This has got me so frakking angry. If you don't watch Battlestar, then frakking is a rude thing that coal seam miners do to holes in the ground.
And with the current government party effectively in walking dead status, this is a perfect time for them to slip this sort of snouts in the trough legislation through. Keep your eye out for some more like this in the coming weeks.
A few, I dare say, marginal seat politicians have objected to this legislation, or voiced deep concerns. And sure they might try and claim the higher moral ground for a few news bites, but they are still going to take the money when it goes through.
And the worst thing about this one party is as bad as the other. Instead of Liberal and Labour you might as well call them butter and margarine. I can't taste the difference.
Take the issue which is commonly called "boat people" in this country. When in opposition Labour attacked the Liberal Government for lacking compasion, but when in power, took an exterme right position on the issue, more right than the previous government's position.
But don't get me wrong here, for every complaint I have of one party, I can identify an equal complaint with the other party. They both talk about how they serve the economy and forget the people who vote them in. Neither side has any real answers for the big issues.
And so all this is going to do is allow the party machine to drown out any idependant and original message with the continual party diatribe, even more than ever before.
Well I've never written to my local MP before, but now I will. If you support this policy then the other guy is going to get my vote. I'll write the same thing to whoever the other guy is and let them work out the conundrum between themselves.
Now the government is telling us, this is a good thing, It means that parties won't be influenced by big money, like in the USA, which is funny because most of the time they seem to be doing exactly what the USA is doing, like going to wars, locking people up in some bay, etc.
I think it's a little too late to be worried about big money. I mean, what do all you politicians do when your finished being politicians, you go and work for all those big money interests that you represented when you were in government.
And I include you in that list Mr Carr, touting yourself up as the next leader of federal Labour. What did you do when you stopped being Premiere of NSW (that's like a state governor for anyone in USA). You went and worked for the same financier that made a mint out of public works tollways you helped roll out while in government. I would expect this from the Liberals, because they are meant to represent business and facists, but people from Labour go and do exactly the same thing.
No one is fooled for a second that big money interests aren't already represented and well entrenched in our government. Just look at the ICAC investigation into Obeid, which gives us an idea of what is going on regularly. They don't need to worry about some $5,000 limit on donations, they just go around it.
Actually come to think of it, this absurd spin of how this is such a good thing, which they can barely deliver with a straight face, has made me change my mind.
The worst thing about this is that all that money is not going to be spent on getting the message out, it's just going to be spent on useless spin and attack ads. And for propping up the son's printing business or the wife's PR company.
So heres an idea. I'm guessing that an informal vote doesn't count towards this revenue. Since voting for one party is as bad as voting for the other, how about, just vote informally. Don't put numbers on the ballot sheet, just write in really big letters: "NOT GETTING MY DOLLAR".
I can't think of a better way to protest than to hit their wallet nerve. And it's not like my vote is doing any other good.
Well it's a thought.
Monday, May 27, 2013
Defending The Battleship
Do you remember when Windows Presentation Foundation first came out and suddenly all the Microsoft WPF avangelists were saying, "Battleship Grey... Yuck!" to put down traditional Windows forms to make WPF sound better.
Well you know what. They missed a very important point. It was never just battleship grey.
Back in '93, I worked for a place that hired a consultant who, for as much as I could see, spent 30 mins every morning changing the colour scheme of his Windows... uhm was it 3.1. First he started off through all the team colours for Rugby League and then after exhausting that sport, moved onto AFL. (These are two types of football games for any international reader out there).
And about the same time, Visual Basic was getting popular and we started to get lots of crazy coloured contexts. You know, the sort of app where all the windows to deal with accounts receivable are in green, while all the accounts payable are in pink and so on.
And this used to ifuriate me so much because the Win API had some clearly defined custom colours that were just being ignored. If you choose your own colour scheme then everyone used the colours the developer liked. But if you used the system colour schemes then the user could use the system configuration tool to choose their own colour scheme.
Why is this a good thing?
Well not so my colleague could keep himself entertained for half an hour every morning.
But rather, because the eye and all the wiring and process to support it is possibly the most complex organ ever developed in evolution. And Most people are not average but sit somewhere on a bell curve. Half the people have better than average sight and half the people have below average sight.
Some have colour blindness, some are dislexic, some work in light too bright, some work in dark rooms. And the ability to change the colour scheme of you whole system and all supporting applications in a single go is absolutely essential.
For example, I am dislexic, and I've found that if I tone the white background of text fields to a slight blue/grey then I can actually avoid headaches that I otherwise get after a while reading black text on a white background.
These days I wear tinted glasses that do much the same thing, but being able to adjust the colour of the background still helps.
It was one of the things I was looking forward to Windows Phone 7 because I had heard they had tight control on colours. But Windows Phone 7 was a little too locked down and the colour schemes that the user's had to choose from had some serious flaws.
It's something I miss with Web Development, where "graphic treatments" are order of the day and no one seems to care about us poor dislexics. There is probably more effort put into helping blind people read web pages through trying for WC3 Accessability conformance.
But at the same time, if you've done enough browsing, you will almost certainly come across a web page where you find the colour scheme so bizarre that you can barely make out the text, and usually have to select the text with the mouse just so you can read using the inverted colours.
Wouldn't you like to be able to control colours on certain web sites? Without resorting to hacing the CSS that is.
Well you know what. They missed a very important point. It was never just battleship grey.
Back in '93, I worked for a place that hired a consultant who, for as much as I could see, spent 30 mins every morning changing the colour scheme of his Windows... uhm was it 3.1. First he started off through all the team colours for Rugby League and then after exhausting that sport, moved onto AFL. (These are two types of football games for any international reader out there).
And about the same time, Visual Basic was getting popular and we started to get lots of crazy coloured contexts. You know, the sort of app where all the windows to deal with accounts receivable are in green, while all the accounts payable are in pink and so on.
And this used to ifuriate me so much because the Win API had some clearly defined custom colours that were just being ignored. If you choose your own colour scheme then everyone used the colours the developer liked. But if you used the system colour schemes then the user could use the system configuration tool to choose their own colour scheme.
Why is this a good thing?
Well not so my colleague could keep himself entertained for half an hour every morning.
But rather, because the eye and all the wiring and process to support it is possibly the most complex organ ever developed in evolution. And Most people are not average but sit somewhere on a bell curve. Half the people have better than average sight and half the people have below average sight.
Some have colour blindness, some are dislexic, some work in light too bright, some work in dark rooms. And the ability to change the colour scheme of you whole system and all supporting applications in a single go is absolutely essential.
For example, I am dislexic, and I've found that if I tone the white background of text fields to a slight blue/grey then I can actually avoid headaches that I otherwise get after a while reading black text on a white background.
These days I wear tinted glasses that do much the same thing, but being able to adjust the colour of the background still helps.
It was one of the things I was looking forward to Windows Phone 7 because I had heard they had tight control on colours. But Windows Phone 7 was a little too locked down and the colour schemes that the user's had to choose from had some serious flaws.
It's something I miss with Web Development, where "graphic treatments" are order of the day and no one seems to care about us poor dislexics. There is probably more effort put into helping blind people read web pages through trying for WC3 Accessability conformance.
But at the same time, if you've done enough browsing, you will almost certainly come across a web page where you find the colour scheme so bizarre that you can barely make out the text, and usually have to select the text with the mouse just so you can read using the inverted colours.
Wouldn't you like to be able to control colours on certain web sites? Without resorting to hacing the CSS that is.
PHP Strings Are Fast
I've recently been playing with PHP again. Last time I touched it was 2001 or there abouts.
And I found I needed a HTML-Builder (well needed to port my C# one). Being a little rusty I looked around for something like a StringBuilder and found none. Because, as most of the posts put it, PHP strings are fast enough.
Well I wasn't completely convinced, so I wrote a quick test that through a number of iterations built up 3 really big strings at the same time, and the response just came back straight away. Not to be put off I kept upping the iterations till it was getting to something absurd, when finally, I got an out of memory error. But the key point is, up till that moment, the responses were always coming back almost instantly.
So well done PHP. I find some of the language a little old fashion, but those PHP strings are lightning fast.
And I found I needed a HTML-Builder (well needed to port my C# one). Being a little rusty I looked around for something like a StringBuilder and found none. Because, as most of the posts put it, PHP strings are fast enough.
Well I wasn't completely convinced, so I wrote a quick test that through a number of iterations built up 3 really big strings at the same time, and the response just came back straight away. Not to be put off I kept upping the iterations till it was getting to something absurd, when finally, I got an out of memory error. But the key point is, up till that moment, the responses were always coming back almost instantly.
So well done PHP. I find some of the language a little old fashion, but those PHP strings are lightning fast.
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