The web site for Senator Conroy, the Australian Minister for Censorship, has infringed on copyright and failed to remove the code when requested by the author. As reported by ITWire the DBCDE web site uses a Javascript to generate a “tag cloud. The Javascript was written by Aleks Bochniak who requested on 1 March 2010 that the script be removed. He requested the removal of the code because “I do not want in any way to be associated with yourself, your office or your policies”. The copyright information has been deliberately removed from the script so I’m asking DBCDE to prosecute the DBCDE and Senator Conroy, whose photo appears large and proud on the site, for copyright infringements and issue an immediate take down notice for DBCDE web site.

ITWire also reported that Senator Conroy is already censoring his own web site by removing the the term “ISP Filtering” from the tag cloud. The code below is from the ministers website – http://www.minister.dbcde.gov.au/:

for(var i=0; i<=15/*<-Important! increase this value by 1 everytime a keyword is excluded below*/; i++)
{
var z=0;
for(var j=0; j if (unique[i]==split[j]) {
z=z+1;
}
counts[i] = z;
}
var size = getTagClass(z);
//Customise the tag-cloud to display what shows up
if (unique[i] == "ISP Filtering")
{
continue;
}
document.write(''+unique[i]+' ');
}

This is type of action that Senator Conroy would like to impose on all Internet access in Australia, filtering any content that is embarrassing the Labor Party or government. Make no mistake, the filtering that Senator Conroy wants to impose has nothing to do with paedophiles and child pornography, these are already illegal and offenders can already be prosecuted under Australian and international laws. This offensive material is not distributed by web sites, it is distributed by email, peer-to-peer sharing, personal FTP servers and encrypted file transfers. The ISP filtering Senator Conroy wants to impose will do nothing to stop these methods.

In late November last year Optus rang up saying that my contract was just about up and asked if I was going to renew my contract. The phone caller offered a new Nokia 6710 Navigator as part of the 2-year contract. After telling them that there was still 3 months to they offered to waive that contract and any penalties if I signed up then over the phone. My Nokia 6110 had been a good phone as had all of my previous Nokia phones, so I agreed.

I received the 6710 a few days later and it felt a little flimsy in my hand but thought it would be OK. A week later I received my next bill, Optus had charged me for both the new and the old contract effectively doubling my bill. A rather irate, one hour phone call and this was “fixed” by the call centre. Then I had trouble texting, which I use a lot to customers and my daughters. The phone was “missing” characters as I typed messages into the phone. My eldest daughter sent a couple of text messages from my phone and made the same complaint. The phone was only two weeks old so I rang Optus and after a lot of hassles they arranged a swap over with a courier company delivering a new phone and taking the slightly older phone away. After a few weeks I started having the same problems texting. I’ve worked out it is actually the keypad. When typing one handed the small speaker on the back of the phone that emits the little beep for each character gets covered up by a finger, so you don’t hear the beeps to select the correct letter. The number pad gets really sloppy and has to be pushed directly in the middle of the key or its not detected by the phone. The two sections of the phone “wobble” when the slide is opened. It’s impossible to read the screen when outside, you’ve got to move into the shade or go inside. The new mapping software called “Ovi” is crap, you have to type in a postcode as part of the address search – so I can’t use the navigation feature. How many people know the postcodes of every suburb in Australia? What a stupid “required” option? It’s quicker to get a laptop out, connect to Internode (my ISP) using a 3G dongle and use Google Maps to work out where I’m going. The whole phone just feels like a cheap plastic knock-off, not a high quality Nokia phone.

That’s the last Nokia phone I get, I’ll put up with this as long as I can but I’ll probably end up buying a phone and swapping the SIM card out.

I’m starting to feel like a motoring journalist or “Top Gear” on the cheap. I’m teaching in Lithgow each Tuesday for this semester so I get a TAFE car to travel back and forth on Tuesdays. I’ve made 3 trips in 3 different cars – a Toyota Ascent sedan, Toyota Camry and a Holden Epica. They are all automatics with 4,5 and 6 speeds respectively and this what causes problems (other than the lack of headroom in the Ascent and Epica) – the 6-speed box in the Epica is useless. It doesn’t like 100 km/h – you get to 100 and the box changes into 6th and the car starts slowing down Press the accelerator and you drop back to 5th and get back up to 100 and it changes into 6th and slows down. 50 km of this is very frustrating and the “cruise control” doesn’t do any better!

However, the biggest problem I have is that in all three cars you can’t see anything of the car past the back window and the rear door handles. This means you can’t see where the car finishes when reversing, which is sort of needed when parking.

I can heartily recommend that you shouldn’t buy any of these vehicles … LOL

AGIMO’s policy and planning division general manager Graham Fry told a Senate Estimates Committee hearing that scoping the potential for a platform change could cost more than it saves.

“Agencies are obliged to consider value for money on each occasion they apply a software,” he said.

“That means considering value for money between the alternatives of open source and proprietary software.

“If the cost of assessing it was greater than the cost of the software, you would have to think twice.”

The above quote shows just how much misinformation is fed to politicians by public servants in their efforts to maintain huge IT budgets and justify the annual expenditure of $500,000,000.00, mostly to Microsoft, for proprietary software licences. The last sentence shows how incompetent Graham Fry is – denigrating open source software because it is free. Graham Fry asserts that because something is free it is incapable of performing the tasks it was created for. He further goes on to say:

While open source software may reduce licensing costs, the cost of support could be an issue.

Does this mean that there is no support cost to proprietary software? If Graham Fry truly believes this then I would expect to see mass sackings and a significant reduction in salary expenses because proprietary software doesn’t need support. Does Graham Fry realise how ridiculous he sounds to IT professionals? Does Graham Fry care as long as his mates at Microsoft keep taking hundreds of millions of our tax payers money back to the US?

Ref: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/166884,open-source-not-free-senate-hears.aspx

Microsoft has decided that every Windows 7 user must be treated as a software “pirate”. A soon to be released “update”, “Update for Microsoft Windows (KB971033)” under the name of Windows Activation Technologies (WAT), will make any computer running Windows 7 “phone home” to Microsoft’s servers every 90 days to be checked against known “pirated” signatures. I believe that this will be listed as a priority update so it will be applied automatically to most systems. I know that Microsoft considers software “piracy” to be a problem in some countries but then doesn’t seem to care about it in others (notable African developing countries). Microsoft also charge different prices for their software depending on the country and some times there are significant differences.

What do you think?

Full details at Who Owns Your PC? New Anti-Piracy Windows 7 Update “Phones Home” to Microsoft Every 90 Days.

What a fortnight! I started back at TAFE last Monday and tried to continue the set up of PCs and new Mac Pros ready for teaching this year. I set up a Windows 7 64-bit box and found that the DET* Adobe CS4 installer didn’t install Photoshop. When you install Adobe CS4 on a PC running a 64-bit version of Windows you normally get 2 versions of Photoshop – the 32-bit and 64-bit versions which support different plug-ins and effects. This meant that I had to start again with the 32-bit version of Windows 7. When I had finished this I discovered that Windows 7 Enterprise wouldn’t activate properly – #$%@&*! Windows. Time was running out so I decided to clean up last years Windows XP installations in the Lab and use those again, I’ll sort out the activation process later.

Whilst all this has been going on I have also had serious hassles with the Mac OS X Adobe CS4 DET installer, the new installer for OS X 10.6 wasn’t released until Monday this week. This was the “Intermediate” version (??? DET terminology – Design Premium ???) but it included most of the software we need to deliver courses. All of the packages installed, but every Adobe application crashed as soon as it was launched. So I was erasing the whole disk and re-installing without updates, without any other software installed and still no success. At the suggestion of the programmer who writes the DET Installer I tried on another system that hadn’t been turned on before. Success!!! So I did all of the Apple updates – half of the Adobe applications crashed as soon as they were launched. In the meantime, DET had release the “Comprehensive” version (??? DET terminology – Master Collection ???). I started comparing the two systems to identify any differences.

I decided to wipe the original system, install Adobe “Comprehensive” and then all other software when the Adobe software was working. Another successful install with all software working. I’m currently creating a deployment image so I can get as many systems working today and I’ll have to finish the classroom on Monday.

What caused the problem with Mac Pros? When I start setting up a Mac Pro with the OS X Install DVD, I use “Disk Utility” to wipe the hard drive. During this process you can choose between 2 different Mac formats – or Mac OS X (Journaled, case-sensitive). I have always chosen Mac OS X (Journaled, case-sensitive) because of using Linux and my background in web design. MyResume.docx is a different file to myresume.docx and also a different file to MYRESUME.docx. When trying the installation a the second MacPro I didn’t wipe the hard drive, I was just racing to see if I could get a working system. The default setting on new Apple computers is Mac OS X (Journaled) which ignores case-senstivity on file names and programs. This means either Adobe or the DET programmer have specified file names which are interpreted differently when a case-sensitive format is used on the hard drive. At this stage I am just imaging systems as fast as I can so I can’t identify the exact cause.

This hasn’t been a great start the new year at TAFE, hopefully things get better as we go along. On the other hand I am quite busy on the Bathurst Computer Solutions side of things with people upgrading RAM in their laptops and needing help getting new hardware and web sites set up. It seems that people are starting to see the end of the “Economic Crash” and have more confidence in the future.

* DET = NSW Department of Education & Training, who can’t supply me with the Adobe installer discs because of the contract with Adobe.

You may have noticed that my web site is “blacked out” in protest to the Federal Labor Government trying to censor the Internet. Senator Stephen Conroy and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd refuse to listen to industry experts and the wider community and continue to try to censor the Internet under the False guise of protecting children. All of the sites they talk about protecting children from are already illegal under Australian law. For more information visit The Great Australian Internet Blackout.

From http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20091108
Please remember to say thank you to a Veteran on Remembrance Day.

It hasn’t been a good fortnight with a close relative passing away quickly from terminal cancer. The morning of the funeral I got a text message – no one could log in at TAFE, the Xserve was down. I ducked in and the server wouldn’t boot. There was nothing I could do so I told them I’d start the next day.

I tried the troubleshooting but the system just hung at the spinning grey circle and the grey apple turned into a grey circle. I quickly thought this would be the logic board. I grabbed a G4 and put the two hard drives in and the system reported RAID errors and wouldn’t boot. I booted from the Tiger DVD and used “Disk Utility” to repair the RAID. The system came up and was running OK, so I added the PCI 64-bit Fibre Channel card and got the students files back online. Great, it only took 9 hours to get it up and running.

The next morning whilst I was checking everything the system crashed! F**k!  The drives wouldn’t reboot at all. So it must be the drives, this time the RAID won’t rebuild. This meant I must be wrong about the logic boards. So away I went installing OS X Server again back on the other two drives in the Xserve. That took another full day and a half including setting up all of the accounts. I had to write and run a script to change all of the ownership settings of the students’ home directories. I finally got everything finished and the students were away working on final projects.

An hour later the server crashed Lots of swearing!!! At least it rebooted and everyone could access everything again. It just kept rebooting at random intervals with nothing failing in the logs. Well, I’m hoping that it lasts 5 weeks and then I can get all of the new systems set up when they arrive in a couple of weeks.

It has been an interesting 7 days for the computer “geeks” and early adopters. Windows 7 was released with much fanfare and hype over the built-in security. Canonical released the latest Ubuntu 9.10 on 29 October with a range of upgrades. Of course this has meant a couple of busy days as I copy all of the data off my laptop onto external USB drives and then totally wipe my laptop after deactivating various Windows based products. I installed Windows 7 Pro 64-bit first and the initial install was fine and It was just time consuming to add all of the other software, I’m still not sure I haven’t missed something , with Windows installing 64-bit and 32-bit to the separate “Program Files” and “Program Files(x86)” respectively. A nice surprise was Photoshop CS4 resulting in both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions being installed. Frustratingly this was the only Adobe CS4 product that was 64-bit. The little bit I’ve used it has been fine, so far so good.

This morning I found a nice new web site that makes it easy to install the various open source and free software options available on Windows XP/Vista/7. It works in the background and only installs verified software with all the junk toolbars and other crap disabled. Try the free Ninite as you upgrade to Windows 7 or just to get the software in XP or Vista.

Ubuntu 9.10 amd64 was a simple ISO download and burn to CD. The installation was the customary 7 steps, with the only hassle being that I like to create a “/home” partition to make backups easy. This involved manually resizing the Windows 7 main partition (Windows 7 creates 2 partitions as part of the install – a 100 MB “recovery” partition and the rest for Windows) and then manually creating the three partitions (/, swap and /home) before continuing the installation. A working system in 30 minutes! I then started copying my data across and installing the extra applications that I use all the time. The only hassle I found was with Synaptic’s “Quick search” not finding some extra packages but the full search did. Adding the extra repositories for Medibuntu and VirtualBox was simple so multimedia support and virtual machines were quickly enabled. KDE4 installed fairly easily and the new login screen with the option boxes on the bottom menu bar made it simple to change desktop environments.