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!

Oh, and I did rather badly on the Physics exam on Monday. Got my numbers mixed up and spent too much time trying to check them. I mean, it most definitely would not have 51A as the current if it were a parallel circuit… right? So, that was screwed over…

Oh, and after lunch, I have the UNSW IAC English Comp to do… wow, such great fun. And in Software, Mr. B. decided to enroll us into the National Computer Science School (NCSS) Challenge run by USyd. Yay, fun. Except that he enrolled us in the ‘Advanced’ course. And I don’t really know any proper programming. And the course uses Python. Which I don’t like simply because of its syntax (it’s soo different the the C/C++/C#/PHP syntax I like). So I’m going to have to learn a whole new language, whilst trying to teach myself C#, whilst trying to do all my school work, whilst I want to design and finish my WordPress theme, whilst I want to try and learn the advanced Javascript stuff called AJAX… Yeah, I’m kinda overloading myself XD

Anyways, the Firefox 4.0b2 looks good. The Appstabs are useful… if I could just work out how to keep them there. I need to read into the help files about that… Anyways, I should go now =]

• Battery life: battery life reduced rather much. In just 3 hours the battery dropped 2 bars. I’ll be checking up on that though, just to see if it’s a fluke on my side
• Connectivity: well, now 3G internet doesn’t work, and Ovi store isn’t compatible =[

Otherwise, it seems to be a pretty good firmware. The version I’m using now is a lot better than the previous one I found (well, he did make that one nearly a year ago…). The settings all work, the effects are brilliant, the CPU speed seems like it’s actually working (still only 443MHz though), the framerate of apps has been increased, and it has a lot more features now… but despite all this, I feel uneasy, and the loss of 3G internet, and a shortened battery life, just adds to it. I guess the feeling comes from uncertainty and the fact that it’s new.

However, I’d love to have this custom firmware, or at least some of its features, in the stock firmware…. maybe I could cook up my own using this guys work?? Don’t really want to distribute it. All I want are a few of the features (more like some off the apps he added with it). Hmm…. might take a bit of experimenting, but I should be able to do that…

Stuart's Choc-chip and my Chocolate muffins

Us celebrating!!

Today in software (about 15 minutes ago) Mr Benic decided to celebrate Stuart’s and my birthday (yes, he’s a little late, but hey! We got cupcakes!) Here are two photos!!

Edit: Thanks to Sean for correcting some of my gramma =]

TTFN!! Ta Ta For Now!

So… as I watch Firefox trying to save a draft of this post while my ADSL2+ router says that the DSL signal has been lost and blah blah blah (seemingly awfully cheap 2wire Gateway free from Telstra). Ohk, maybe it’s just the awful phone lines we have in Australia, maybe it’s heaps of people using the same wire for the same thing (wouldn’t surprise me), maybe it’s the router, or maybe it’s just inherent in the technology and the distance I live from the exchange, but does it have to drop the signal so many times a day?? If that wasn’t annoying, the router hijacking your browser and saying “Connection Lost” or “Resolution Successful. Please restart your browser” certainly makes me lose my temper. I feel like (and this is getting violent) getting a sledge hammer and smashing it to pieces because of all the pain it’s caused me and others. I mean, it says to restart the browser so that you can use the DSL connection again, as if the browser was incapable of realising that the connection was temporarily lost, when if the connection is lost, then resolved, and I haddn’t tried loading a page during that process, then nothing pops up!!!! I think the real reason 2wire added that was because they realised that the router, after hijacking that, just loved to keep on hijacking the browser. Instead of fixing the hijacking (or even out right removing it), they decided to tell the user to restart their browser, get them all annoyed, frustrated and later angry (like I’ve sometimes got) at having to restart the browser, waiting for it to close (Firefox can take a surprisingly long time to close, you know. And I don’t mean like the window closing, I mean waiting for the entire process to close. Why does the computer take so long to close a program after closing the window?) and then opening it up again, and waiting for it to load up everything, and then load all the tabs you had open. Waste hours of my life, and everyone else’s life, or just a couple of hours of yours where you remove a bug and make people happy and buy your products again… which is better programmer? Yeah, I’m not buying a 2wire router again if I can avoid it. This Telstra router (probably a bad example to have learnt from) has made me afraid and annoyed of 2wire routers now. Cisco, you look like a good brand, I’m gonna try you next.

Now that I’ve finished ranting about every thing. I just want to say: screw it! I’m not bothering to make this site look the same in all browsers. I’m designing this theme I’m working on for browsers which support nice portions of CSS3. In other words, I’m supporting the better browsers of Firefox, Safari and Chrome. Internet Explorer and Opera can go and try to impress someone else. I can’t be bothered trying to design a site and create countless images for backgrounds to try and make it look like the CSS3 I want, when I can use CSS3 and say ‘stuff Opera and IE’. Although, I’m sure Opera does have CSS3 support for the features I’m going to use, they just don’t seem to render it when I add the CSS for it (even with the vendor extension of -o-… like, when I put -o-border-radius like it supposedly was in 2008, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t render it with obvious ones it won’t use like -khtml-, -webkit-, -moz-, but it doesn’t even work with just plain border-radius)

Anyhows, before I write a massively long post about nothing (oh wait, I just did), I’m gonna finish off with saying that the band comp today was reasonably good. Many people were missing (we only had 4 flutes turn up, and the bass guitarist didn’t show) and so we sounded lacking, but we apparently still managed a bronze, so that was ok. I felt extremely nervous up on stage, and I’m sure I sounded nervous playing, especially my solo. Even after all these years of performing, I still feel extremely nervous. Maybe it comes from me feeling subconsciously under prepared from lack of good, solid practise.

Well, TTFN!! Ta Ta For Now!

Anyways, what I want to do in this post is ask you guys who read my blog: If I changed my theme to include a toggle-able  sidebar, would people get lost by it, or would they appreciate the change?? Or would that be rather pointless?? I’m lodging this to you guys because, personally, I can’t decide… =[

Also, would it be better to make the site fixed width, or flexible (with a minimum width)?? What do you guys think eh?? I'm edging towards a flexible option, but fixed is so much easier and retains a better standard look to it (besides, its the only way to get a rounded corners design in all browsers easily, not that I was going to bother with compatibility with browsers that don't support enough CSS3 *cough*IE*cough*Opera*cough* (why is it that with Firefox being behind Opera and Webkit for speed, it still has some of the best CSS3 support?? Maybe Firefox cares more about presentation than speed? I mean, Firefox 3.7 - now Firefox 4; running Gecko 1.9.3 - now Gecko 2.0; still doesn't achieve 100 on Acid 3......))...

Anyways. I'm gonna also try and work on actually making a mobile version of this site, for mobile devices with larger processors and screens, like any touch screen phone from Nokia from 5800 onwards (so, 5800, 5320, X6, N97, N97mini, N900, C5, N8... actually not that many phones, when you think about it), or all those wonderful other touch screen phones from like Samsung, LG, HTC, SonyErricson and once-upon-a-time Google. Oh, and I suppose if they work on those phones, they're bound to work on the iOS4 or even the iPhoneOS3+ products (like my brother's iPod Touch)...

Well, anyway, my plan was to sit down and design (or visualise) what I would like to have as a template for my website as viewed on a desktop. Then I would design what I would like to have as a template for a mobile browser mentioned above. Then I would try to write up (on paper at first, just some rough stuff) some basic XHTML to make it work, and when I finally come up with what looks like it'll work in both situations, I'll give it a go =] Don’t worry guys, you won’t really see any of the experimentation on this site. It’ll be on the ‘testing blog’ I set up, so you don’t have to be subjected to broken webpages too often.

Anyways, I’ve blabbed on long enough. BTW, I’m surprised at the number of people who have links to my blog on their blogs, that link to my old URL, Pressing-On.net or the blog subdomain. Even when I put in a redirect page. And then had it jump straight to MidnightFire.net.au, they still didn’t update the link (or mayhaps just never used the link. Oh well)… anyways, one person got it correct. Lenny =] I think… =S

TTFN!! Ta Ta For Now!