Daylight Savings ends Sunday April 5th :
Change your clock, change your smoke alarm battery.
Only working smoke alarms save lives!
Why run computer labs?
What’s the point of running a university computer lab when all the students bring laptops anyway? That’s a question that schools have been asking themselves as computer ownership rates among incoming freshmen routinely top 90 percent. — When every student has a laptop, why run computer labs? (2009-Mar-27) [ARS]
ABC television’s Q&A program – Episode 7 – 26/03/2009 Q&A live from Melbourne
On the Q&A panel were Stephen Conroy – Minister for Communications, Greg Hunt – Shadow Minister for Climate Change, Andrew Bolt – Provocative Columnist, Louise Adler – Publisher and Susan Carland – Muslim Sociologist.
[Download this episode of Q&A as MP4]
Blacklist snares Bill Henson fan site … Colin Jacobs, spokesman for online users lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said: “With an abortion site, the Peaceful Pill Handbook and Bill Henson photos all now revealed to be on the blacklist, claims that the list only includes the ‘worst of the worst’ of the web are sounding like those over-emphatic defences of Guantanamo Bay.”
…
Greens Senator Scott Ludlam said: “It’s a classic example of that scope creep. They say it’s about the worst of the worst but before you know it it’s expanding to cover other kinds of material.” …
– Blacklist snares Bill Henson fan site (2009-Mar-27) [SMH]
‘Oh no, we won’t block sites for political reasons’
Who watches the watchers?
Conroy admits blacklist error, blames ‘Russian mob’ … Senator Conroy, under siege after this website’s report yesterday afternoon that an innocuous link containing Henson’s artistic photographs of young boys had been added to the blacklist, said “the classification board looked at this website and actually said it’s PG”.
“A technical error inside ACMA I’m advised included it … but it was actually cleared by the Classification Board so it shouldn’t be on the list,” Senator Conroy said.
“I’ve asked ACMA in the last few hours to go through their entire list again to see if there are any other examples of this.” …
– Conroy admits blacklist error, blames ‘Russian mob’ (2009-Mar-27) [The Age]
I think we are now at the point where this system’s credibility (along with the Minister’s) has sunk below zero and into the negatives.
‘Caching error’ caused Henson blacklisting … The Australian Communications and Media Authority said in a statement that a link to innocuous PG-rated artistic photographs taken by Bill Henson was incorrectly included on the list in the period December 1, 2008 to February 19, 2009 as the result of a “computer system caching error”. …
– ‘Caching error’ caused Henson blacklisting (2009-Mar-27) [The Age]
A caching error, who are they trying to kid? After fed being this crock as an answer we are supposed to trust the ACMA with technical internet solutions; boy are we in trouble!
Created to take a stand against the greatest threat our planet has ever faced, Earth Hour uses the simple action of turning off the lights for one hour to deliver a powerful message about the need for action on global warming. — http://www.earthhour.org/
8:30PM local time, wherever you live on planet earth. Saturday 28 March 2009
At 8.30pm on 28 March 2009, Earth Hour aims to inspire 1 billion people in 1,000 cities around the world to take part in turning off all non-essential lighting and appliances.
Earth Hour 2009 has a theme of Vote Earth, and invites people of all ages, nationalities, race and background to use their light switch as their vote – Switching off your lights is a vote for Earth, or leaving them on is a vote for global warming. — http://www.earthhour.org/
01 Australian Grand Prix Preview – Formula One 2009 Season
2009 Australian Formula 1 GP Circuit Preview
ING Australian Grand Prix 26-29th March 2009 Albert Park Circuit Profile :
5.3-kilometre circuit
No of Laps: 58
Race Distance: 307.574 km
Lap Record: 1:24.125 – M Schumacher (2004)
Cisco Security Advisories and Notices [1] Cisco is announcing program changes for the publication schedule for Cisco Internetwork Operating System (IOS) Security Advisories.
Starting on March 26, 2008, Cisco will release bundles of IOS Security Advisories on the fourth Wednesday of the month in March and September of each calendar year.
This schedule change will not restrict us from promptly publishing an individual IOS Security Advisory for a serious vulnerability which is publicly disclosed or for which we are aware of active exploitation.
Cisco is adopting this approach in response to extensive feedback from customers, who seek further predictability for support planning and deployment cycles. …
Cisco Security Advisory:
There are eight Security Advisories for the March 2009 set.
… We added this support at the machine level in order to enable the feature for all users on the machine. Seems reasonable right? Well, turns out that enabling this functionality at the machine level, rather than at the user level means that the “Uninstall” button is grayed out in the Firefox Add-ons menu because standard users are not permitted to uninstall machine-level components. …
– Uninstalling the Clickonce Support for Firefox (2009-Feb-27) [Brad Abrams:MSDN Blog]
That’s correct, with the install of .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 you get ClickOnce support for Firefox. You don’t need to be running IE for your drive-thru Active-X application injection! Proving once again that MS still don’t get the whole security over convenience issue. Remember this is a MS Service Patch installing what is basically malware into another application, this just should not be occurring.
Whale Song
The new Optus add where an orchestra performs for the whales. Brilliant advert!
In a week or so we will be including “learning electronics” merit badges in some of our kits & tool packs at Adafruit Industries. The first one is “learning to solder” – if you’re new to electronics, we’ll have a special bundle of tools, a kit and limited edition “badge” to show the world you’re proficient in soldering, once you complete the tutorials and kit that is!
– “Learning electronics” merit badges from Adafruit Industries
Summary [1] This list contains 2395 webpages or site variations derived from the those secretly banned by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) and used by a government approved censorship software maker in its “ACMA only” censorship mode. The last update to the ACMA list is August 6, 2008.
While Wikileaks is used to exposing secret government censorship in developing countries, we now find Australia acting like a democratic backwater. Apparently without irony, ACMA threatens fines of upto $11,000 a day for linking to sites on its secret, unreviewable, censorship blacklist — a list the government hopes to expand into a giant national censorship machine.
History shows that secret censorship systems, whatever their original intent, are invariably corrupted into anti-democratic behavior.
This week saw Australia joining China and the United Arab Emirates as the only countries censoring Wikileaks. We were not notified by ACMA. …
That’s the problem with secret lists, they become public. And then they can be analysed.
University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt said the leaked list “constitutes a condensed encyclopedia of depravity and potentially very dangerous material”.
He said the leaked list would become “the concerned parent’s worst nightmare” as curious children would inevitably seek it out.
But about half of the sites on the list are not related to child porn and include a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist. [3]
ACMA said Australians caught distributing the list or accessing child pornography sites on the list could face criminal charges and up to 10 years in prison.
Another earth shake here in Melbourne this afternoon. After the shake a few weeks back. About 5 seconds worth here in Parkville.
VICTORIANS have been struck by another earth tremor about 4.30pm today, with reports from Coldstream to South Gippsland. [1]
VICTORIANS have been struck by another earth tremor about 4.30pm today.
A seismologist from Geoscience Australia, which monitors earthquake activity, confirmed the tremor hit at Korumburra, about 90km southeast of Melbourne, about 4.30pm. [4]
Earthquake Details: [5]
Date: 18/03/2009
Time (UTC) hh:mm:ss: 05:28:20
Latitude: -38.390
Longitude: 145.800
Depth (km): 18
Magnitude: 4.6
Felt radius: 113 km (approx)
Damage radius: 9 km (approx)
The epicentre was 5km west of Korumburra, strength about 4.6 on the Richter scale
It would appear that any multiple page PDF is doomed to failure when we print to our e-Studio 351c using the PostScript driver.
The quick fix:
In Acrobat Reader go into the advanced button in the print dialogue and set the print as “Print as Image”
> Print > Advanced > Print as image
UPDATED 23-Mar-2009
The “Print as Image” works but slows down the whole printing process. Some further investigation showed that changing the Font and Resource Policy: to “Send for Each Page” solved our problem with no loss of print speed.
RT @CollingwoodFC: Eddie McGuire says that the incident involving Adam Goodes & a spectator in the final quarter "goes against everything o… 3 hours ago
