Speckled Green

Hey Sticky! Does this fix your RSS feed complaint?? Turns out all I had to do was update the plugin, and there was an option to exclude it from the feeds. I’m not actually sure if it works the ways its supposed to though, which is why this posts exists =]

Ahh… having to listen to their stupid debates, horrendeous and overly negative ads which don’t tell you anything and lie straight in your face (way to misquote Labour!! You’re worse than the media! Sadly, it’s working…)… I could go on for ages, except I’m starting to grow tired of thinking of this aspect…

I just feel annoyed currently at the Communication’s policies of both parties. I say “YAY for NBN!”, but I also say “You have a good point there” to the Liberals. Whilst installing an independent FTTH system for a National Broadband system is most certainly the best idea there is, the cost of it, and the way it’s being managed (by bureaucrats, the 2nd worse type of managers) probably (and most likely) isn’t. $43 billion??? You sure it’s gonna cost us this much?? How much of it was spent on ‘consultancy’?? about 20%? Because that seems to be all Kevin Rudd ever did.

However, the Liberal’s proposal, spending $6.3 billion to ‘encourage’ the private sector to expand, upgrade and install new services, is the most dismal, lazy and stupid idea I’ve ever heard. Especially as they don’t actually have any plans on how to ‘encourage’ the private sector beyond grants as incentives for rolling out something. They want competition to encourage the rollout of faster and better internet in Australia. What competition?? We only have 22 million people. See what we currently have with competition? Now, tell me what I should expect in 8 years time on the Liberal’s plan. I don’t hear Telstra, Optus or any other telco planning on giving my area Cable or Fiber internet in the next 20 years. Bella Vista has cable internet, and they’re only 600m East of where I live!! Kings Langley has cable internet, and they’re only 400m South West!!!! So what makes you think a few incentives to the tune of a few million each will encourage the only two telcos with the size to do any cable laying are going to give me FTTH for my internet, phone, TV and gaming needs??

Yeah, well I’m done on that. I’m getting bored about yelling about it to the internet. Personally, I’d like to see an amalgamation of all the parties to be in power: the best ideas of all of them, with the worst ones thrown out the window. Unfortunately, that in itself is impossible. So, all I can do is keep on dreaming…

On something completely not related to politics, I would like to invent/develop/create/purchase a collapsible, capacitive multi-touch (4+ points of touch), 19″ OLED widescreen. The technology is available, it’s just stupidly expensive, and no vendor would even consider producing it, so it would have to be a custom order/design. The hardest part would be getting the flexible capacitive OLED screen, especially a 19″ one. Never mind building it, or making sure the thing doesn’t break with the slightest shake. I can forsee many problems with my idea besides those above, but I’d still like to have it. Imagine a 2nd screen you can keep in your bag, multi-touch input, low power, compact and portable. I suppose the bulkiest part would be where you keep the ports and where everything folds into.

EDIT: more raging. When the Liberals suggested increasing the use of wireless internet to cover broadband (woah, wait, you want me to pay $100 a month for 4GB a month?! I can get better on ADSL2+ from Telstra, let alone TPG), they were asked what spectrum they were going to use to deploy it on (people doing Physics will remember that the window for wireless technologies is getting smaller and more crowded). Mr Smith (the Liberal) said they could use the old Analogue TV radio spectrum. Immediately, flags start popping up exclaiming that this guy has no idea what he’s talking about (that, and the fact the this policy was only announced at 11am this very same day, and the press conference this debate was at was at 1pm the same day…)… *FACEPALM*

Anyways, I’d done now. Time to get back to studying =]

TTFN!! Ta Ta For Now!

Is that how it’s spelt?? Disoriented? I can’t tell, I’m too lazy too look up a dictionary, but the spell check says it’s correct! Anyways, that’s how I feel. The two weeks of holidays, and then pupil free day before returning to school on a Tuesday instead of a Monday, and then spending most of the day out driving around with my dad or at the Band comp today… it’s just got my mind all muddled up. That and I feel sad at finishing two stories this weekend. I finally finished reading Cardcaptor Sakura (yes, the manga, not the anime. And yes, I know it’s a kid’s one, but hey, I’m allowed to relieve parts of my young childhood aren’t I? Besides, I wanted to know what the story was. When I was a small kid and tried watching the anime series, I missed too many episodes and didn’t understand it. That and the fact that the anime changed many things from the manga). And today I watched the final episode of Monk (season 8) on Channel Ten. Yes, I know, as Kai pointed out to me, that it finished last year (actually the last episode was filmed in 2008), and it’s just taken forever to be aired in Australia, but still, it’s finally finished. After growing up with it, it’s sad to see it ending. I don’t seem to be able to believe that it’s over…

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So, here I am at Sean’s house, using my mum’s laptop, and we’re working on our SDD project. Sean and Ben are busy coding, while I’m trying to workout a splash and layout for the GUI to our silly ATM project. More later.

Just been trying out the new Firefox 4.0 beta 1, and it sure does look and feel different. Actually, I’m trying the Portable Edition, but really all that is is just boxing up the normal version to run properly off a USB…

Anyhows, many people have commented that Firefox 4 is just trying to copy Opera (like they said Chrome was copying Opera, and Safari was copying everyone else…). And I thought “you know, they seem perfectly right…” until I read someone’s comment on the matter: Read more »

They’re like emails, except they’re books!! Anyways, doing some digging around on the internet, I managed to find myself two good ebooks, for learning C#!!! One was a compilation of some online lessons from Programmer’s Heaven. Pretty good, it’s teaching me all the basics I need to know so far, and showing me just how similar PHP is to C++ (then again, thinking on it, I don’t really know that much PHP XD no, really, I don’t know that much PHP). Soon I’ll move onto the slightly harder aspects. Thankfully the language hasn’t changed much since .Net 1.1 was released, so the tutorial is still good; all Microsoft have really done (or so it seems) is just add new features to the language as the .Net library grows in functionality.

But in case I do need to learn something more up to date, I managed to dig up an ebook copy of another good book, Essential C# 4.0, which was officially published the day Microsoft officially released .Net 4.0 and C#4.0 (funny how C# updates at the same time, and to the same number as the .Net framework does… would have nothing to do with C# being the native .Net language now, would it? =P  ), and contains up-to-date practises for C#, and which I can use to cross reference the other book I have (in case they changed any syntax or something, like what happened with one tutorial I tried a while back. It was written for C#2 or earlier, and when I tried it in C#4, it didn’t work!!)

But another book I found was a book about AJAX. Haven’t had a look at it yet, but maybe it’ll be helpful for future web development, and help me understand the technique better. Either way, I look forward to being able to read it soon, and put it to at least minor use on my blog! Talking about my blog, I must remind myself to recheck what IntraIP have when to offer when March comes around.

Well, I haven’t been blogging much recently… kinda a shame. But mostly it has to do with either not feeling in the mood or just not being able to think up of something to write that wasn’t so mundane that it bored even me (and hey, I can read some really boring stuff sometimes).

But the thing that has been going over my mind the most is the new Doctor Who series (which, along with David Tennant leaving and Russell T. Davies leaving as well (he was the lead producer/scriptwriter/director for the 1st 4 series + Torchwood), brought about a new face and style to the series, hence their idea to completely renew it) which is now called Series 1 (again), with Matt Smith as the new Doctor (you know, when I first saw him, I thought he wasn’t going to be anywhere as near as good as David Tennant, but hey! He’s living up to David’s reputation pretty well!), the new Sonic Screwdriver (green? Wow, odd, like when the one Dr Lovesong (or whatever her name was) had in the Library… red with lots of extra parts), and the New Brand New TARDIS!!!! It’s like, childlike, fun, bigger! Kinda like the Doctor’s personality. At least, David’s portrayal of the Doctor… Read more »

And these ones happen to be Apple lovers…. eww (not aimed at you Anthony, these people go beyond the sensible)

Commenting on an article about how Apple has lost a tribunal (in Australia) about a trademark/product name DOPi vs their iPod (and then it continued on with more of Apple’s bullying tactics that, when Microsoft used them, broke Microsoft up…), some Apple fan wrote this: Read more »

Hi guy’s!!!!! I’m typing this from my brother’s iPod whilst eating dumplings! I had to install an app to make this work properly, as it doesn’t work in the browser. My brother said to mention that I’m taking ages to do this. I think I should get my own iPod Touch now, except I want to convince my mum to get me a new phone (the Nokia 6500 slide is really annoying me with it’s bugs!)

TTFN!!! Ta Ta For Now

How silly of me! I forgot to add the wp_footer() call to the end of my theme!! No wonder some things wouldn’t work (like my stats counter).

Fixed it now, so that should be better. I wonder what else I forgot to add? Read more »