Posts by Bryn Smith

Artists install Monty Python silly walk signs in Norwegian town

Maybe London can follow suit

Suggestion for London to take a leaf out of this book and put a special crossing sign in Abbey Road (just to annoy the car drivers even more!)

http://lacamiseteria.deviantart.com/art/Abbey-Road-Sign-287880975

Assange fails in bid for election to Australian Senate

small correction

In a half senate election, the quota for electing 6 members is actually one-seventh of the vote cast. (Similar to the quota required for electing one member for a lower house seat is one-half of the vote cast.)

Apple updates maps to remove Australia’s ghost-city in the desert

What about the other "Rural Cities"

I wonder where Horsham Rural City takes you? Somewhere in the middle of the Little Desert National Park? At least there is water and camping facilities there.

I can see this problem applying to lot of places in Victoria with the same naming structure (Benalla, Wangaratta, Ararat, Swan Hill). Though Mildura is the most inhospitable! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_government_areas_of_Victoria for reference)

Thumbs up to Apple for fixing this quickly. Just a pity the Apple Maps saga is still going on (and so my phone still runs iOS5).

China turns on the sprinklers with ambitious rain-making plans

Australia gave up first

The CSIRO had a cloud seeding research program that ran for a while, but was abandoned decades ago because it is quite expensive and unreliable...

http://www.csiropedia.csiro.au/display/CSIROpedia/Cloud+seeding

Rogue kangaroo floors broom-wielding 94-year-old

No rabies here...

Rabies has never been detected in Australia, which is just one of the many reasons that our customs department is really anally retentive about importing animal matter.

Men at Work appeal Down Under plagiarism ruling

Limits on the claim

I heard an interview on the radio with the music company exec representing the "Kookaburra" song and he said that they could only claim a percentage of the last 6 years' profits from Land Down Under. It seems that Men At Work have some kind of case to answer for - they should have negotiated with the copyright holders instead of letting this go to court...

Apple chokes on Woolworths logo

Not quite what was reported in The Age

If you look at the original article in The Age:

http://www.theage.com.au/technology/biz-tech/apple-claims-woolies-is-getting-fresh-with-new-logo-20091004-ghxe.html

It says that

"Apple is spooked by the fact that Woolworths has gone for a blanket trademark that would allow it to slap its branding and logo on every imaginable product."

This is an important point. While Woolworths doesn't currently make or sell PCs, they are applying for the registered logo that they could potentially use to market them.

Woolworths could probably just get around this by restricting their application for trademark to not apply to electronic devices or similar.

3 has no place Like Home

Not in Australia

This might just be 3 UK that is dropping 3 Like Home - It's still detailed (without any termination date specified) on the 3 Australia website.

American man too fat for execution

There's always the gas...

Wouldn't an anaesthetic that is administered in a different way solve things? How about nitrous oxide? Surely that would put the fatso to sleep so they could skip straight through to the final lethal drug...

Where were you when you learned e-voting was unreliable?

I don't know why the americans can't do it...

In Australia, there have been trials of electronic voting, first in the Australian Capital Territory elections (2001), and then for Federal elections. It's written by a local company and works on standard computer hardware, under a linux environment.

The software is open source, and the Australian National University found an error in one of the modules, which was corrected before the election. If you're really interested, you can download the source code for both the 2001 and 2004 territory elections here:

http://www.elections.act.gov.au/elections/electronicvoting.html

I'm not linked to the company who wrote it or any election authority - I just find it interesting that it's so hard to make a computer system that performs such a simple task reliably and securely!

Reality distortion for Java on Leopard?

Waiting on Cupertino

Thing is, unlike Unix/Linux/BSD and Windows, you can't just download the JDK from Sun for Mac OS X. Apparently this is because Apple told Sun it was going to take charge of development of the Mac OS JRE/JDK.

So anyone who wants to use the latest features of Java *have* to wait for Apple to get off their backside. Since Java 6 has a few important features (for example, the new layout manager used by NetBeans apps) there are a lot of people who would love to see it available for their Macs.