Now? You want to do this now?
I have a right to know! I'm getting married in four hundred and thirty years!

Because It Bears Repeating

Stephen Conroy and the Rudd Labour Government are the enemies of free speech and of human rights in general.  They are ignorant and dishonest in equal measure, and their only saving grace is that they are neither competent enough nor popular enough to get their abominable legislation passed through the Senate.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:27 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 55 words, total size 1 kb.

Toshiba Australia, You Still Suck, Though Objectively, At Least, Not As Much As You Did Last Month

Subjectively, however, I'm even more annoyed than before.

There's now a model of their neat little T110 notebook available in Australia for $699, much more in line with pricing elsewhere in the world.  It has an AMD rather than an Intel chip, but I'm fine with that.

But it's the single core model.  The dual core model available elsewhere is only slightly more expensive, has only slightly shorter batter life - and is twice as powerful.

But we don't get that one.

Grrr.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:02 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 100 words, total size 1 kb.

Fractal Wrongness In A Programming Language

I have 800 arrays of about 5000 integers each that I need to combine into an array of about 4 million integers.  I don't care about the order or anything, I just want one big array.

PHP had used 8 minutes of CPU time and 1.2GB of RAM when I shot it through the head.

Solution: Don't use PHP.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:15 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 65 words, total size 1 kb.

I Hate Sauerkraut!

Also crazed starving weasels.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:24 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 7 words, total size 1 kb.

Dear Dell Australia

I can't configure a server on your site with more than 4GB of RAM or SATA drives bigger than 250GB.  Last time I checked it was not 2002, so could you please FIX IT?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:15 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 37 words, total size 1 kb.

Die, Atom, Die!

Atom feeds are evil and must be killed.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:14 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 11 words, total size 1 kb.

That Is Not The Way To Do It!

I've mentioned LINQ, Microsoft's attempt to make accessing datasources more idiomatic.  And I've mentioned IronPython, Python running on Microsoft's .NET platform.  Since LINQ is part of the .NET library, IronPython can use LINQ.  So I went looking for examples, and found this:

songs = ThenBy(OrderByDesc(  
          Select(content.Elements(xhtml.ns +'tr'), ScrapeSong),   
          lambda s: s.added), lambda s: s.artist)

That is not only not the right way to do it, it actually leaves me wondering if it is possible to construct a more wrong way to do it, short of INTERCAL.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:27 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 92 words, total size 1 kb.

SecondPersonPronounTube

YouTube has zotted my account, for a "Community Guidelines warning sanction" over the opening credits for Popotan.

They sent me an email saying they'd suspended the video, although the reason is about as vague as it could possibly be - that text I just quoted is all they gave me.  But no problem, I'll take it down....

My account is also suspended, something they neglected to mention.

Meh.  Guess I can post anime ops and eds here if I really need to.

Still, it's small potatoes compared to some suspensions.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:10 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 91 words, total size 1 kb.

Saying This While I Still Can

I've long been in favour of Australia adopting the American Bill of Rights unaltered.*

How long I will be permitted to state these views publicly is now in question, following this bit of complete insanity from South Australia:

South Australia has become one of the few states in the world to censor the internet.

The new law, which came into force on January 6, requires anyone making an online comment about next month's state election to publish their real name and postcode.

It could also apply to election comment made on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The law ... also requires media organisations to keep a person's real name and full address on file for six months, and they face fines of $5000 if they do not hand over this information to the Electoral Commissioner.

This little abomination of human rights is the work of South Australia Attorney General, Michael Atkinson, whose worst crime against humanity prior to this was his single handed prevention of an adult classification for computer and video games in Australia.

No computer games can be sold in Australia unless they are classified by the censors - the Office of Film and Literature Classification - and since there is no adult category, that means that no games can be sold unless they fit into the MA15+ category - i.e. suitable for 15-year-olds.  Any change to this legislation has to be approved by all the state Attorneys General, and Mr Atkinson is the sole holdout.

The reason he gives for this range from the inane to the dishonest, but so do the OFLC's reasons for blocking games.  Fallout 3, for example, was banned in Australia because it includes the use of morphine as a painkiller.**

Read that again.  No need to bang your head against your desk; I'll do that for you.

That's hardly the worst or most recent offense of the OFLC, either.  Just recently, they decided to criminalise the depiction of adult women with insufficiently large breasts.***  In their defense:

We're all taking this too far, says Australian censorship blog Somebody Think of the Children. While it's true that the law does ban women who "look younger" than 18 from appearing in adult publications and films, images of small breasts alone are not "automatically" considered "illegal." For instance, "it’s highly unlikely that a naked photograph of a 30-, 40- or 50-year-old woman with small breasts" would ever be banned.

Images of small breasts alone are not automatically considered illegal.  Australian censorship blog Somebody Think of the Children, you should not automatically be considered insane and committed to an asylum.

And all this is on top of Senator Conroy, the worst Minister for Communications in Australia's history - and given some of the prior incumbents, that's saying something - and his ongoing crusade to destroy the Internet in order to save it.  Australia already has a secret blacklist of web sites that are illegal to visit; dissemination of the list or linking to those web sites is also illegal and subject to a fine of $11,000 per day (and per Senator Conroy, possible criminal charges).

Currently, this secret censorship has no teeth other than the stifling of discussion, though, because there is no actual filter on Australia's internet connections.  The sites are banned, but you can only be fined after the fact.

What Senator Conroy is planning, in the name of protecting the children, of course - he has a regular habit of acccusing his detractors of being in favour of child pornography - is installing mandatory filtering at all of Australia's internet providers that block all requests to the banned list of sites, and extending the list to cover thousands more.  And introducing a second, even more extensive filter with an opt-out clause, which filter, under recent controlled trials with a list of 10,000 banned sites, had a false-positive rate of just 3%.****

This filter works on HTTP requests on port 80.

So it does nothing to control the spread of Senator Conroy's chosen enemy via other channels, does nothing to check encrypted connections of any sort, and imposes a secret regime of censorship on the entire country. 

It can, as it is currently planned, be trivially bypassed via any encrypted proxy or VPN; we can safely assume that those will be next on Senator Conroy's little list.

We need to get rid of the whole present totalitarian mentality at the next election.  No Australian should even think of voting for any candidate supporting such attacks on fundamental human rights.  And then we need to adopt the Bill of Rights for our own.

Update:

Attorney-General Michael Atkinson has made a "humiliating" backdown and announced he will retrospectively repeal his law censoring internet comment on the state election.

After a furious reaction on AdelaideNow to The Advertiser's exclusive report on the new laws, Mr Atkinson at 10pm released this statement: "From the feedback we've received through AdelaideNow, the blogging generation believes that the law supported by all MPs and all political parties is unduly restrictive. I have listened.

"I will immediately after the election move to repeal the law retrospectively."

You will move to repeal the law after the election?  You assume too much, Mr Atkinson.

* Many people here look askance at the Second Amendment, I see no reason we shouldn't adopt it along with the others.

** Fallout 3 was eventually released here; I understand they changed
the name of the drug.

*** You may bang your head against your desk now.

**** If you haven't studied enough statistics to grasp the significance of this, let me explain.  Assume there are ten million web sites in the world (there are far more than that).  Assume 10,000 of those are blocked intentionally.  With that rate of false positives, 300,000 sites will be blocked unintentionally, that is, there will be 30 times as many errors as there are correct answers.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:16 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 987 words, total size 7 kb.

Toshiba Australia, You Suck

The Toshiba T115 and T135 are awesome little notebooks.  The T115 has an 11-inch screen and a single-core Core 2 CPU; the T135 a 13-inch screen and a dual-core Core 2.  Apart from that they're basically identical; 1366 x 768 LED-backlit screen, real keyboard, wireless b/g/n, 2GB to 4GB RAM depending on the model, 250GB or 320GB disk likewise.  Not much bigger than a netbook, but a lot more powerful.  The T115 is $461 on Amazon, the T135 starts at around $600.

You can't get them in Australia.

What you can get is the T110 and the T130.  Which have the same specs, but retail for $999 and $1299 respectively.

The Aussie dollar is currently at 91 US cents.  You do the math.

You'd think that with such a huge disparity in pricing, someone would step in and import the US model....  And that's exactly what has happened.  The T115 is $699 locally (including sales tax) and the T135 starts at $899 depending on the model.  They'd probably be even cheaper except that the importer honours the warranty, including shipping costs to and from the US repair centre.

Pure mercantilism, but it's Toshiba's own fault for leaving the door wide open.

Update: Aha!  There's an Athlon Neo X2 version of the T115: dual-core 1.5GHz with Radeon 3200 graphics.  I ran Haruhi with Vista with full Aero effects on a 3200 motherboard for a year - albeit with a 2.6GHz CPU - and that's quite a capable combination.  Cost is $765.  Battery life will probably be noticeably shorter than for the single-core models, but my current notebook's battery is shot and only gets about half an hour on a charge, so it's bound to be an improvement.

Update: Rats, they piddled in my cornflakes.  It doesn't have Wireless-N.  Only one of the 11" models does, in fact.  But then my current notebook doesn't have Wireless-N either.

Update: Huh.  When did Australia enter the 21st century?

All goods (except for tobacco products and alcoholic beverages) may be imported duty and tax free if their value is $1,000 or less.

Update: That model is $498 on Amazon.  So $699 $765 locally isn't bad is a little steep, but still a lot cheaper than Toshiba Australia, who don't offer that model at all.  They list a 6-hour battery life compared to 8 hours for the slower Intel single-core with its slower Intel graphics; I think that's a reasonable trade-off.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:29 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 408 words, total size 3 kb.