A good attempt by the Australian Govenment to put its services online, is somewhat spoiled by the lack of 24hr access.

To work as a contracter in Australia an ABN ( Australian Business Number ) is required, you can apply for these online, which is amazingly unbureaucratic.

But, and there is allways a but with the Public Service, the website appears to be available during business hours only, outside of that I get no response.

Maybe I'm being cruel, but I can just imagine the site running on IIS on some public servants desktop PC which is turned on at 9.30am and off at 5.00pm :-)

Now MS is trying to brainwash the kiddies into believing that IP theft is a more serious problem for society than it actually is.

Societies have real problems, this effort could be better placed trying to solve them.

Might have to read up on one D.Eisenhower.

He seems like he was a wise and thoughtful guy.Link

Some people just have way more than their fair share of talent!

Want to feel a sickness in your stomach and a righteous rage.

Look at this

This world intrudes and saddens me, this is so wrong.

Update: The Photographers Blog Fascinating

"...There are seventeen provinces in Iraq, and more than ten are quiet. They are busy rebuilding the infrastructure; building a new democracy, but mostly just getting on with life.

Unfortunately, the "Sunni triangle" is a region churning with an insurgency that shows no sign of letup. But by focusing on the flames, the media does not give the world a fair or accurate representation of what's happening for most Iraqi people, or for most of the Coalition forces. I, too, have spent most of my time in Iraq in these dangerous provinces, so even these dispatches might indicate that Iraq has more problems than is actually the case..."

Every wondered where the items confiscated at airport security checks in the US go?

Here

This is quite foul. The Motion Picture Association is trying to play its desire to maintain profitabilty as a social benefit by convincing the Scouts of Hong Kong to add a badge for Intellectual Property Protection. Companies have no morality, here that is proven again.

Now I'm going to inject a little personal essay into a mostly tech related blog.

A few weeks back now, my son Ali was up late and distressed with teething problems, eventually after alot of calming and a dose of baby panadol he dropped off to sleep.

I however, was wide awake with typical goldfish like brain activity.

A gekko was on the fly wire catching mozzies, so immediately I felt a bond with the little fella, he was after all reducing the number of Satans little helpers entering the bedroom.

Watching it was medatative, I realised I wasnt thinking of anything else except my observations. Now people who know about Meditation would probably have far superior ways of calming the mind and emptying it of spurious thoughts. Me, I've got my gekko on the fly wire, and thats ok with me.

He's been back almost every night since, sometimes with a buddy, usually I just hear the click-clack of a gekko tongue but sometimes I find myself watching them.

Nature, continuosly amazing.

Hehe, The Revenge CD, a CD with alot of very annoying noises.

For that occasion when a neighbour is lacking consideration for your personal auditory space, load up the Stereo and let fly...

This is good, free pdf of the book 'How we got here'.

Expanding on themes first raised in his tour-de-force, Running Money, Andy Kessler unpacks the entire history of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, from the industrial revolution to computers, communications, money, gold and stock markets. These stories cut [by an unscrupulous editor] from the original manuscript were intended as a Primer on the ways in which new technologies develop from unprofitable curiosities to essential investments.

Into photography? Think these newfangled digital cameras lack soul? Prefer the retro-retro to the retro?

Hows about a paper camera, just download the pdfs, print them and origami your way to a National Geographic spread...

www.textdrive.com loosing its gloss?

When it kicked off textdrive had a glowing reputation, alot of heavyweights were using it and recommending it. So I jumped on the bandwagon for my site www.rfidnewsupdate.com

As is usually the case when something appears very good, eventually things happen that lessen your opinion of the same.

Firstly, I run a basic homebrew CMS for rfidnewsupdate, which is a news site for RFID, one of the industries using RFID is the casino industry. Guess what happens when I try and submit an article containing the word 'casino'. Yeh, server error. It seems a while back textdrive were having problems with a spammer, trying to sell something casino related, and their solution was to blanket ban form submission containing the text 'casino'. Not very professional.

Secondly, recently they migrated to some new hardware, it was supposed to be a 'no brainer' for customers, just wait a day or so and its all magically done. No technical reason why a professional shop couldn't do that. Textdrive couldn't. My site displayed 'server error', after some investigation on my part it turned out my script was depending on some perl libraries which were not intalled on the new system!!! How can a hosting company not understand the concept of 'standard build'? Not very professional.

To rub it in here's what the CTO on support duty put in my ticket

I say "New bidwell isn't the same"

He says "Thanks for asking so nicely."

Lovely, so here I am as a paying customer, getting lip from the company I pay for a service, who have provided the service in a less than professional manner. Don't these guys know anything about the 'business' part of running a business?

Perhap something like, "Sorry for our error which caused your downtime" would be more appropriate?


Update: Much nicer and very helpful response to my followup query, nice to see!