Internet filter plan may extend further, says Broadband Minister | Herald Sun

Internet filter plan may extend further, says Broadband Minister | Herald Sun: “The Government’s internet censorship plan may extend to filter more web activity than first thought, the Broadband Minister said today.

In a post on his department’s blog, Senator Stephen Conroy today said technology that could filter data sent directly between computers would be tested as part of the upcoming live filtering trial.

‘Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial,’ Senator Conroy said.

Peer-to-peer file-sharing technology is the most common way for web users to share video, picture and music files between computers over the internet. “

What does Australia have in common with Iran and China?

Achtung! Blog Feedback Wanted

I have been trialling the excellent site content management system Squarespace over on stuartforsyth.com and am more than happy to turn over to that site the photography related portion of my life.  Squarespace, in spite of all it’s strengths, has one major failing as far as I’m concerned and that is forcing you to choose a single page or journal as a default.  I have made the photography journal the default for that site and as such the thoughtmenagerie is not immediately visible or accessible.

The idea behind having all your on-line eggs in one basket is an appealing one and I thought, incorrectly as it turns out, that consolidating all blogs and journals under one umbrella would be a good strategy.  The problem is the majority of debate and collaboration has occurred here on wordpress and the exposure to the same content over on squarespace, due to the aforementioned technical constraints, just isn’t as good.

So I’m giving serious thought to keeping my day to day journal at WordPress.  

So here is my question to all readers who have been gracious enough to leave both intelligent debate and snark.  What is it you’ve enjoyed from this blog up till now and what topics would you rather not see more of?

My preferences currently, and not including much photography, is to carry on blogging about technology, science and belief (from my atheistic standpoint of course ; I’d really appreciate your feedback.

Early notes on GoogleApps

I’m really pissed at Microsoft. Why? They wasted billions on Vista when they should have been virtualizing Windows and making their developers’ investments apply to the net. I know it sounds outlandish, but it really isn’t. Amazon doesn’t offer EC2 for Windows, just Linux. And I’m stuck with two Windows boxes at my hosting company, hosting a dead fucking end. My bet on Microsoft in the late 90s just ran out of gas.

- Dave Winer

Early notes on GoogleApps (Scripting News)

When is enough … well enough?

I was interested to note that RSS aggregator netvibes has gone social with the release of their upgrade codenamed ‘ginger’.  At first glance it appears netvibes is reaching into the social networking space by offering functionality seen in other social networking sites like Facebook.  You still have your back-end reader and widget pages but now you can register your ‘universe’ on netvibes and have a public face with your selection of apps and widgits.

I will play with it a little, tech tinkering for want of a better phrase, but at the end of the day enough is enough which in a way is a pity because I just can’t keep up.

Here is a short list of areas I am plugged into (top items of highest importance) and keeping track of these is fast becoming more hard work than fun.

Social Networks

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Pownce

Blog

• WordPress
• Ipernity

Photo Sharing

• Flickr
• Ipernity
• Redbubble
• iStockPhoto
• Facebook

RSS

• Newsgator
• Google Reader
• Netvibes

Messaging

• Skype
• MSN Messenger
• Meebo
• Google Talk

And the list goes on.  So as new companies bring new content to the web I find less time and less inclination to actually go and look at them.  Sure App A may be technically superior or more beautiful than App B but as in the case of Facebook, my network is there, most of my friends are there; I’m not going to persuade them to move to the latest new thing so I will keep using Facebook.  Same thing with Pownce – awesome functionality – nobody there I know yet.

Google’s open social network excites me a little; I believe that opening up the web and providing common bits of code which can run independently across different companies is a way of unlocking us so we aren’t necessarily tied into one application for too long.

The big problem for new startups however is that unless you’re first to market or able to provide a radical new service, something so outrageous as to attract a huge cloud of interest and potential migration up front, breaking in to the existing spaces like social networking  is going to be a hard and unrewarding slog.  So although netvibes has some cool new features and wizzbang widgits I am not likely to change from my existing social platform any time soon.

 

p.s. There are some tools to help manage these various services.  My preference for pulling Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress & del.icio.us under one roof is the Flock browser.  Flock is built on Firefox but has additional hooks into all of the aforesaid applications giving you complete control over all of them right from your browser.

Microsoft WorldWide Telescope in Action

Witness the power of the fully operational Microsoft WorldWide Telescope, as Roy Gould and Curtis Wong walks the audience at TED through this stunning software effort. Some experts say that the WorldWide Telescope, which puts together terabytes of information from telescopes all over the world to make a seamless rendition of the entire known Universe, will change the way we—the normal humans—understand the cosmos. After seeing it in action, I agree:

[From Microsoft WorldWide Telescope; Gizmodo]

Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope

Several days ago we wrote about something extraordinary that Robert Scoble said was coming from Microsoft and it was going to be announced on February 27th. When he saw a live demo of it at a recent visit to Redmond, he said it was enough to make his eyes well up with tears. TechCrunch is now speculating that this extraordinary something from Microsoft is a WorldWide Telescope. The desktop software would be available for Windows users and would allow them, as Michael Arrington says, to “pan around the nighttime sky and zoom as far in to any one area as the data will allow.  Microsoft is said to be tapping the Hubble Telescope as well as ten or so earthbound telescopes around the world for data. When you find an area you like, you can switch to a number of different views such as infrared and non-visible light.”

This would be wonderful for people who are interested in astronomy but don’t necessarily have the time or the access to the real thing.  I will be very interested to see how this stacks up against Google Sky or other desktop software like Stellerium.

A Funny Take on Windows Vista

So, soooo bad!

‘Friendly’ Worms Could Spread Software Fixes

‘Friendly’ Worms Could Spread Software Fixes: “An anonymous reader writes ‘Microsoft researchers are working out the perfect strategies for worms to spread through networks. Their goal is to distribute software patches and other friendly information via virus, reducing load on servers. This raises the prospect of worm races — deploying a whitehat worm to spread a fix faster than a new attacking worm can reach vulnerable machines.’

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just what we need! As if things like automatic Windows updates weren’t intrusive or inherently unpredictable enough Microsoft thinks friendly viruses are the way to patch systems.

Crouching Leopard, Hidden Vista – What’s wrong with the Penguin?

I’ve been tinkering with Linux distributions for many years, since the install hell days of Redhat 4 many years ago but I’ve never settled on Linux as a base operating system.  As time goes by and I find the inner geek demanding less and less attention I spend less time with Linux and today’s article on Download Squad entitled ‘How to enable DVD playback on uBuntu’ made me wonder why.

Most Linux distros up and running are really good; they have slick graphic effects to rival any crouching leopard or hidden vista, come with many useful out of the box tools and are generally easy to install these days … so what’s the problem?  Why would my wife (J) never ever run Linux?

At the end of the day I think it boils down to ease of use, ease of setup and what comes out of the box.  J loves the Macbook period. One minute post-install and she can play with her photos, watch a movie, connect effortlessly to the Internet, check her email and chat to friends with the built in camera.  Applications are a simple drag-and-drop-to-your-Applications-folder for her, there is no need to teach her command line apt-get or worry because she has library dependency issues that require a 400Meg download to resolve first.  She doesn’t have to hack a new system to include Microsoft codecs or run a host of command line options to enable standard DVD playback when our little boy wants to watch a movie.  Upgrades are a single click affair and she doesn’t run the risk of her entire system crashing or worse her Gnome or KDE unable to start after an upgrade leaving her with a black screen and a blinking cursor.

As I get older and the demands on my time increase I also want to be able to sit down and write a blog post or wizz up some wonderful photo effects in Photoshop without fighting to get the program or OS to where I want it to be; sitting for ages fixing dependency issues or compiling software for my hardware platform just no longer holds any appeal. 

Perhaps I’ve found other toys or outlets for the inner geek but I want my system to work reliably, look beautiful and be powerful enough for my needs.  Until linux distributions get closer to this ideal, realise people want to do more with their computers post-install than bang a spreadsheet together in OpenOffice and put the effort into working to overcome the geek requirements of linux and most users’ fear of ‘what if things go wrong?’, Linux will (in my opinion) never be a viable competitor to Microsoft or Apple.

Stitching Photos Together in Photoshop

I’ve had a great time today stitching panoramas together in Photoshop. The functionality can be found under file > Automate > Photomerge and you load a whole bunch of separate images together and out pops the composite or panorama. It works flawlessly (so far) and seems much better than ptGui; software I tried out for doing similar composites.

Here is the result of 3 photos which have lurked in my photo-library since 2006 as 3 separate images, now brought to life as I had originally intended. This tree is a good couple of centuries old due to the thickness of the trunk. Standing next to it was a truly awe-inspiring moment.

I Love My new MacBook Pro

I have suffered grievously under Micro$oft Windows. I have run the gamut of inadequate upgrades from the early days of Windows 3.0 all the way up to the last OS-vomit called Vista. Enough was enough and it was time for an upgrade so I went Apple and I am loving every minute of it. My home machine (with Vista) has been formatted and uBuntu installed on it as a file server; most of my current personal dev is done in Rails so the Mac is a wonderful choice with rails installed with Leopard and the king of editors TextMate purchased shortly thereafter.

I really can’t rave enough about this machine and how happy the switch has made me; here is a little peek at my desktop with on old rails tut loaded into textmate.

Sooo pretty! (click for bigger view)

Why I Love and Hate Facebook

Social networking website such as Myspace and more recently Facebook have been creating huge publicity over the last couple of years. Their addictive nature have caused many a work place to have them banned from their employees web access and many a person has found themselves trolling around mindlessly for hours looking for long lost friends and family.

My Facebook profile was a revelation to me though; I set it up initially as a closed network for friends and family to share some of the things I find interesting, like my photography, and for me to see what they were up to however I never really expected the deluge which followed. First up were the work colleagues; failure to accept them into my profile would create all sorts of embarrassing shuffling in the hallway and low level mutterings so on they came. Then came the work colleagues wives … er ok … how do you respond when the bosses wife sends you a ‘naughty gift’; big potential problems right there.

Then the friends/acquaintances from school 15 years ago suddenly started popping up wanting to be best buds … ok … so we had something way back in the annals of history, let’s say hi … on they came. Then came the friend collectors who suddenly wanted to be big buds with me and share my personal virtual real-estate and swap stories of their progeny; guys back at school who, in the throws of effervescent schoolboy testosterone, you’d like to smack in the face (and probably did) all of a sudden want to be super-best-chums …. they are ‘obviously’ still way cool though because their network has 476 friends hence the need to collect you for meaningful social interaction.

Facebook looks set to create groups for your friends; each group will have privacy options that you can set which will dictate how much of your information you allow these people to see. I can’t wait for this new development and have my groups thought up already.

Family
Friends
Work Colleagues
Hobby Sharing
Dicks from my youth

Can’t wait

Lightroom is light years ahead

 As anyone which a love of digital photography knows, your choice of photo management software is an important one.  Mac users have been spoiled to date with tools like Apeture; windows users have had to settle for bare-bones choices like Picasa or ACDSee.  Adobe recently released Lightroom and I have been trying it out for a while now; my verdict – I’m blown away.

Lightroom has all the usual folder and tag based photo management of Apeture but it’s develop module is where the software really shines.  With lightroom you can do away with having to have Photoshop for the large majority of the corrections and adjustments you need to make to your digital photos.  As with Apeture the adjustments you make are non-destructive and you can snapshot versions and create virtual copies to edit independently. 

The Lightroom tonal curves adjustment is way superior for a beginner and mostly prevents you doing the kind of stupid things to curves that you can in Photoshop; you know what I mean – move the little curve node a touch to the left and you’re left with a photograph to make your eyes bleed.

One of the most underlooked items in the Lightroom tone curve and hue/saturation/luminosity area is the ‘adjust the curves by clicking in the photo option’.  to be fair I didn’t even know it existed until quite recently.  It is the kind of tool that should be writ in huge bold letters on the startup splash screen of the program.  In the top left corner of the tone curve area you will see a tiny little circle, click it and move your cursor into the picture.  clicking specific areas of the picture and dragging up or down applies the adjustment. 

In my first example below I clicked the little circle which turns into a little circle with arrows above and below.   Now I click in the picture at the location of the first red arrow.  You’ll notice that the area of the photograph I am interested in adjusting falls into the highlights area (second red arrow) and that any adjustments I make will affect the highlights area as denoted by the shaded area around the dot on the line.

 

In my second example I wanted to increase the saturation of the yellowish wall to give it that fresh just been painted look.  Now I could have gone to the saturation area and just increased the yellow alone but the wall is a combination of yellow and orange and that at first glance may not be immediately apparent.  By using the ‘adjust the curves by clicking in the photo option’ you move into the photo and to the area denoted by the red arrow and clicking and dragging upwards will then auto increment the yellow and the orange saturation sliders up by their relative amounts.

There are so many more features in Lightroom that it takes some time to become familiar with them, or in my case even know that they exist.  I may in future posts go through some of them with you but it was this little click and drag feature; so seemingly obscure and unbelievably potent at the same time that I wished to share with you today.

Lightroom is one very well thought out and functional bit of software heaven, if the ease of adjustments are not worth the price for this incredible piece of software then I don’t know what it.

More information on Lightroom is available at the Adobe website.

 

Technorati Tags: Adobe, Lightroom, Apeture, Photography, Photos, Software

30 Boxes – first impressions

30 boxes seemed to be doing clever things with ajax before google calendar and appear to be a bit more than the usual yawn (yet another web2 nice-to-have). Coming to 30 boxes recently from Google calendar I am probably less impressed than I should be but 30 boxes does have a couple of very strong things going for it. 30boxes does tagging, we like tagging, tagging is essential for those of us obsessed with GTD. 30Boxes also has a very clean, uncluttered interface and nice simple actions for sharing information and managing tasks. There are some pretty nifty ajaxy views of your data and I really like the roll-over pop-ups of all my tasks. 30Boxes does not seem to suffer from the bloat of Google calendar and works in all browsers (shame on you Google!) which means I can now have my favourite calendar in Opera without the ‘this browser is too stupid’ message. 30Boxes also won the web-calendar award in PC magazine knocking the Google behemoth into second place.

However the feeling I’m getting from the net lately is a bit of a David and Goliath story gone wrong. Like any large corporate offering, people jump ship because the new thing is from an Apple, a Google or a Microsoft leaving the little guy abandoned, copied and not a little peeved. I like 30 boxes, I like their brave claim to do anything Google does and do it better. I’ll certainly try it for a bit and see how it goes, if anyone has had any success stories with 30Boxes or thinks it is just another yawn, please let me know.  Read some of the buzz about 30Boxes here.

p.s. I’d like to see the whole shared calendar thing in 30 boxes … hint hint!

Why I’ll choose gmail

Here is a little preview from yahoo mail.  Don’t you love all the bright coloured advertising?  This folks is what not to do to your loyal subscriber base.

How to remove Vista from a dual boot system

Requirements: Vista and XP dual booted.

Do the following:

1. Boot into XP
2. Put your VISTA disk in the drive
3. click start, click run
4. type the following: drive:\boot\bootsect.exe /nt52 ALL /force (where drive is the drive letter of your CD/DVD)
5. restart when finished
6. Dance around the room with happiness that the scourge of VISTA has left for good.

hasta la VISTA baby

Vista is gone, it’s nag will bother me no more nor will it’s failures to run my critical software.

I know I waxed lyrical when I first installed it, touted it’s eye-candy prettiness but then I started using it and was mortified by what I experience.

Initially I couldn’t get the majority of my critical software to work; I couldn’t even get it to run Microsoft software or support Microsoft hardware. It didn’t like my Microsoft webcam and would blue-screen every time I had in incoming skype call. I couldn’t run Microsoft’s own development tools like Visual Studio and my other software all broke like bad pre-alpha software – either spilling their guts and memory all over the place or failing silently and miserably. I trolled the Internet looking for a way to disable the crippling Vista nag and I succeeded; however I was completely unprepared for the crippling nag to warn me I’d turned off the first crippling nag!

The most annoying thing for me was that with every new piece of software I placed on the pc, VISTA would run slower and slower until it crawled along like a geriatric tortoise in tar. The tech podcasts and websites are now calling for 4 gig of RAM and hybrid hard-drives (not too my knowledge commercially available yet) to make VISTA run properly. What’s the point? For a little eye candy? The debate is still raging about whether VISTA adds any real security benefit and it’s live applications are a joke. Microsofts antivirus came in stone last in a recent poll failing miserably to stop viruses or malware.

Vista is probably the worst of all operating systems out at the moment. It klunks along like an over-skinned over-worked version of XP which won’t run properly and lacks all the elegance and finesse of mac os or the breadth of application of XP. All I can say is thank god I didn’t spend my hard earned cash on this product; the only down side is I don’t have a vista box and dvd to burn at my next barbecue.

 

I will therefore continue to run, in order of preference:

1. ubuntu linux

2. Windows XP

 

My next computer will most likely be a mac.

Digg Podcast ruined by … dude … dude!

I have subscribed to a number of very good podcasts: the skeptic’s guide to the universe, Tech Nation, TWIT, The naked scientist  and more recently Diggnation.  I am a fan of the website and the content on Diggnation is good, as is the easy rapport the cast have with one another, but I can’t stand the abominable idiotic adolescent language.  Every sentence is  ”Dude …. Dude… ” or  ”totally sweet”  heavily peppered with the most overused conjunction in the English language: “like”.  I can’t stand it, this level of semi-literate and inane language is like a dentist’s drill; speaking in this way highlights the verbal remnants – the grammatical drool if you will – of a sub-standard vocabulary and a lazy mind.  The time for “like dude that was totally sweet” is over, please stop it! – language is beautiful, a proper grasp of it is wonderful and the podcast need not lose its sense of humour by speaking well.

This is closely followed by my other source of irritation; the SMS generation where every email is a mess of un-decipherable hieroglyphics like “gr8 c u l8er dude J “

STOP RAPING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE!

I may have to unsubscribe from Diggnation; Being long past puberty I am obviously not included in their target audience.

Hacking your LG DVD player

I bought a new DVD player this weekend and was frustrated to see that it only played DVD’s for our local region. Having a huge anime (all imported) and movie library with the majority purchased overseas this just would not do. A little poking around on the Internet found the solution and I am led to believe this is a standard procedure on most new LG DVD players.

To make your DVD player Region Free

1. Power on
2. Open the tray
3. Press Pause
4. Enter 0000 (4 zeros, A region reset menu will appear)
5. Enter 0
6. Press Pause
7. Power off

Now when you restart the region restrictions will be removed and your DVD player will play any DVD. Thank goodness for a company with a brain – go LG.

Welcome to my TumblrLog

Thanks to the awesome TWIT (This week in tech) podcast I discovered the Tumblr website (www.tumblr.com)

Tumblr is a blog-lite if you will; a place to collect and share posting stuff such as videos, captions, pictures and general web-content. For so long I have wanted a place to post these snippets without diluting what I am trying to achieve in terms of content and debate on the thoughtmenagerie.

Tumblr is just that sort of place and thus my new collections and interest blog Mark of Insanity is born.