News of the Day

October 12, 2004

New site

I have moved my blog to a new loctaion, in line with my change in employment direction

Posted at 04:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 06, 2004

Your Student Union Fees At Work

This is a perfect example of why I object to paying student union fees. If this is the rubbish they spend it on, I'll quite happily forgo my *discounted* cafeteria and the free parking.

Another well thought-out poster I saw last week at UWS was the All troops out of Iraq poster. That's just such a champion idea. Lets, now that we've almost given the Iraqis their freedom, pull out at the very last minute and let them be slaughtered again by fascist lunatics.

And I thought unis were educating people!

Posted at 10:11 AM in the Uni dept.| Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

February 25, 2004

Semantic Bible

Sean Boisen has released his Semantic Bible site. This is a brilliant idea, using the concept of semantics to create a hyper-concordance that links the Bible based on hundreds of keywords. Sean has written a detailed description of the SematicBible project. Drop by the SemanticBible site or Sean's blog and have a look.

Posted at 09:00 AM in the Religion dept.| Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)

February 23, 2004

My work is hate speech apparently!

According to Andy's employers, the organisation that I work for (Voice of the Martyrs, or at least our US Office's site) is considered to be hate speech!

What is it that we do? Well, we report on the violence and hatred directed against Christians in many different countries. At no point do we direct anger towards or advocate revenge against those who perpetrate these acts. In fact we advocate Christ's words on this issue:

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you
Matthew 5:44

So now reporting the truth is hate speech. We make nothing up, I guarantee it. We don't print anything unless we have had it independently confirmed. Yes we have made mistakes, but then so do all news agencies. However, unlike many news agencies, when we have been wrong we publicly correct it and apologise. There is actually a lot more that happens that we don't print because it's just too graphic.

What hate? We support those who are persecuted, is that hateful? We tell the world about their plight, is that hateful? I don't think so. As Andy put it Ironic, Don't You Think? I mean these people are the ones who are always crying that the religious right suppress free speech and hides the truth. Well, what is this then? Where is the hatred on our sites?

I sincerely hope, as Andy does, that this is just a mistake.

Update: Also, according to this same filtering software, my site is blocked as pornography!

Posted at 02:02 PM in the Not Australia dept.| Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

Starting Uni

Well I've finally started uni. I'm going back to do a Bachelor of Teaching (Secondary) in maths & computers, which means I'll come out the other end (hopefully) qualified to teach years 7-12 maths & computers. I've gone back to UWS in Penrith for three reasons:

  1. I know the uni & it's facilities
  2. It's really close to home
  3. It's supposed to be very good for education degrees

The course is designed to be done over 12 months, with six subjects a semester, but I have to do an additional maths subject to qualify for the Department of Education's requirements for maths teachers, so I'm going to be doing it over 18 months. Not that I mind, I think doing over 12 months would kill me! I'm also dropping back to part time work, which I will probably drop all together once someone can replace me.

Continue reading Starting Uni...

Posted at 12:32 AM in the Uni dept.| Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

February 10, 2004

Installing Mozilla Firefox 0.8

A quick note for those upgrading Mozilla Firebird to Firefox 0.8.

Before you run the installation program, (yes there's finally an installer for the windows version), you have to disable all the extensions that you've installed in Firebird, as they're not compatible with Firefox 0.8. (Update: Dunstan has found that it may just be the Tabbrowser Extensions that causes the problem) If you don't, you'll probably get an error message saying something like Error Launching Browser Window: No XBL Binding For Window when you try to run Firefox after it installs. This got me, and a few other people I know. If you have got this error, don't worry, just follow the instructions below.

To do this, in Firebird go to Tools -> Options -> Extensions and select each extension listed there and press the Disable Extension button. You can then exit out of Firebird and run the Firefox installation. I uninstalled Firefox before I did this, but this may not be necessary.

This information is listed on the Firefox Install instructions page, but who reads instructions? Considering the useless nature of the error message, I think it probably would have been better either to put this info on the download page for Firefox (Update: They have now done this!) or to have the installer automatically disable extensions, and then tell you what to do about it (i.e. Update your extensions) once it's finished.

Just my 2 cents.

Other than that, the new version is good. A few new features & bug fixes. My favourite new feature is the new download interface, which lists all your downloads on one screen and doesn't require you to have multiple download dialog screens open like earlier versions (and most other browsers).

One more note: texturizer (Firefox/Thunderbird helpfiles, extensions & themes) and mozillazine (Mozilla discussion forums) have been hit hard with the new release and are both down for now (as at 1:30 AM GMT)

Posted at 11:37 PM in the Web/Tech dept.| Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

January 23, 2004

Most Addictive.Flash Game.Ever

Yeti penguin baseball, it's is disturbingly addictive. If you can do better than 321.5 let me know!

Update: there's a souped-up version that hit's the penguin further.

Posted at 11:54 AM in the Web/Tech dept.| Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)

January 14, 2004

Adding Feeddemon to Internet Explorer

Feeddemon is a great RSS Aggregator program by Nick Bradbury. Regular readers will already know that I love this program (Download trial version). One thing that would be great that was mentioned on the FeedDemon support forums, is a way to integrate FeedDemon into Internet Explorer, so that you could easily add a feed from a site into FeedDemon. Conveniently, I have a way to do this, shown below. This procedure will add an option to the Internet Explorer "context menu", or the menu that comes up when you right-click on something. This option will send the address of what you've selected to FeedDemon to be added to it's list of RSS Feeds.

UPDATE:The procedure described below is now probably unnecessary, as Neil Jones from Codeforge has taken this idea & run with it. He's created an installer program that you just need to run that will create the context menu for you, no copying files, no registry editing. Brilliant stuff Neil!

For those still interested in the manual option, read on:

Manual Process

Requirements for this to work:

  1. FeedDemon (duh!)
  2. Windows 95 or higher
  3. Internet Explorer 4 or higher (I'll write something for Firebird later)
  4. An understanding that this procedure is followed at entirely your own risk. This worked fine on my computer, but I'm not guaranteeing anything.

Note: This procedure requires you to edit your Windows registry, which is not really all that scary, but I highly recommend you backup your registry! If you're not comfortable with editing your registry, either get someone to help you, or give this a miss use the installer program mentioned above.

Continue reading Adding Feeddemon to Internet Explorer...

Posted at 06:58 PM in the Web/Tech dept.| Comments (147) | TrackBack (3)

January 13, 2004

Typepad Blogging Tool

Fellow Typepadder Alex Hung is writing a blogging application for Typepad in C#. This is a brilliant idea, as none of the currently available applications, like Zempt or w.bloggar, work exactly right for Typepad.

UPDATE: Matt Berther has directed me to his Movable Poster application. It's very cool, and has the bonus of having built-in plugins for aggregator programs to enable you to blog directly from an RSS feed.

Posted at 10:45 AM in the Web/Tech dept.| Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

January 10, 2004

God help us

I agree with Andy, this is sickening beyond words.

Law officers launched a manhunt across the Southeast on Thursday for a jealous ex-husband who allegedly shot three former in-laws to death, strangled his infant daughter and fled with three little girls.

Yes, the days truly are evil

Posted at 03:07 PM in the Crime dept.| Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

"I wish the real world would just stop hassling me" - Rob Thomas