Re-introducing Australian's Sarah Palin

I have to admit I am absolutely fascinated by the the US Elections. Sarah "Expalination" Palin reminds me of Pauline Hanson.

This clip is a song by Pauline Pantsdown, once again, it's made up of quotes from a right wing politican. To this day I think it's still banned in Queensland..



John Howard, famously once called the Deputy Sheriff by George Bush, pandered
to her views and took Australia in the wrong direction.

While this is all very amusing, it's also extremely scary stuff.

Fortunately for Australia, these days Pauline Hanson seems to only run to make money for the votes she gets and since Kevv-e got in, Australia is becoming a better place.

Recent themes in Australia have been some real action on climate change, the wonderful moving apology at the opening of parliament ( why didn't Midnight Oil sing tho ), a solid commitment to introduce paid maternity leave and down in my home state Victoria a move to Legalise Abortion.

Of course the Catholics and getting their choir boys in a knot over the fact they run a 1/3rd of the state's hospitals and that they won't offer abortions and are threatening to pull out all together.

A couple of points here:

1. A Catholic hospital would be the last place any woman would go to get an abortion.

2. Some doctors object to being forced to offer a referral if they have moral problem with abortion and then are threating to quit the profession.

It's not about the doctor, it's about the patient! Go watch some Boston Legal

3. I don't understand why they (the religious right) don't let this one through. When something is technically illegal, but is permitted, you can't have any control over it.

Legalise it and suddenly you can tinker with the law..

i guess that's a bit too complex an idea for the religious right...

So that's the kind of stuff America can look forward to when Obama wins...

But Obama should keep Sarah Palin at the front line of America's foreign policy, watching the Russian coastline...

Sarah Palin in depth interview on SNL

The really scary thing about this is, nearly the entire script comes from Palin quotes

Kevv-E Meets Wall-E

I saw this on SBS news tonight, easily the best Kevin Rudd spoof yet, IMHO

UPDATE: some people seem to be searching for kew-e for this, i guess vv and w look pretty similiar

Costello finally shows he knows something about leadership

Peter Costello showed some real political nouse this week when he backed Kevin Rudd's view of the economy over Malcolm Turnbull.

I was quite suprised by this refreshing change, casting my mind back to before the Election last year, I remember Kevin Rudd establishing himself as a credible alternative by actually agreeing with the Government. (shock horror!)

Truffles so far has been exhibiting some pretty lame binary opposition tactics, calling the government incompetent at every turn doesn't really get you very far, in fact it's counter productive, people just stop listening.

Kevin Rudd quite rightly called for a more co-operative approach from the opposition after the leadership spill. Alas, so far it's just more of the same.

Julie Darth Vader Bishop so far has been a total disaster. I know it's hard for the Liberals to fathom, but after failing to acknowledge plagiarising the Wall Street Journal, she then proceeded to make perhaps the dumbest attack in recently parliamentary history.

Attacking Wayne Swan for making a speech which contains the same material as the assistant treasurer is absolutely moronic.

A quick lesson for Darth Vader, usually political parties have what's called "the party line" and they tend to usually stay on message and deliver what's called "policy".

I know that might be hard for her to comprehend, but that's the way it is...

Sometimes as others have said, it's better to fall on your sword gracefully. Just because Joe Hockey thinks it's a good idea doesn't mean much these days

Anthony Albanese is really starting to be a top performer these days, he is full of great lines such as

When (Ms Bishop) became the shadow treasurer she didn't ask for extra staff she asked for an extra photocopier in her office,

that's almost Keatinesque

A mandate isn't a gay thing

Just a quick note to both Truffles (or is it the Merchant of Venice) and the unrepresentative swill that is family first...

The Rudd government has a Mandate, they went to the election and won, therefore they should respect that. I know it's confusing these days, having grown up with non-core election promises and other such rubbish leftover from the Howard years.

Maybe Mr Fielding thought after hearing the word Man-date that it was something homosexual...

Negative Gearing needs to be addressed

In the midst of the American financial crisis, Australia seems to be doing ok, touch wood.

Finally addressing issues of executive pay and golden parachutes is good to see and should of happened a long time ago.

One of the untouchable policies over the last few decades is Negative Gearing.

Deduction of negative gearing losses on property against income from other sources for the purpose of reducing income tax is illegal in the vast majority of countries, the exceptions being Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. - Wikipedia

Negative gearing sucks IMHO but a lot of people are deeply committed financially to this. It's middle class welfare and market distorting...

I want to see it gradually rolled back, it shouldn't be so hard. Housing should not be the investment industry it is today, make your money investing and creating jobs.

How do we address this? It's pretty simple. People should only be allowed to negatively gear one property. But we can't just change this over night.

I propose to kick this of by capping it, starting next financial year at 5 properties, reducing by one each financial year, ending up at only one negatively geared property per person in 6 years time.

What do people think?

F9 Group Inc spins the truth

Mission accomplished, the offending unattributed content has been taken down, complete with all other CF blogs. they cite the fact that the RSS feeds don't provide enough information to attribute the blog articles back to the author... ahem, bullshit!

Reading on they are going to steal unattributed content from .NET and PHP blogs instead (same RSS problem right?), super guys, thanks for reinforcing my great impression of marketing people....

It was also suggested that I should remove my public RSS feed if I had a problem with them syndicating my content!

As marketers they should also understand language.

Calling a site a blog as in http://blog.f9group.com implies that it is their own content, http://blogs.f9group.com also implies it's their content.
www.cfbloggers.org on the other hand, clearly implies it's an aggregator.

they claimed to always link back to the site, but as the cache shows this wasn't true.



Note the blog title is not a link as can be seen by the cursor and I don't see my name on that page, which they admit in the Coldfusion removed entry, despite the legal notice claiming that they do?

"does not provide the article in its entirety and displays both the author of the article and the Uniform Resource Locator back to the original article from which it was obtained."

UPDATE: 25/09/08 The legal note has been changed but listed under the same entry and date, so for completeness of the record, I present the cached version which looks like this:



The other issue I had was that this page was presented as being indexable by google.



This marketing company seems to really have a good handle on public relations....

Google Reader Australia SSL problem

The recent change with Gmail which allows you to force SSL only access
is great, but there's just one problem down under which is worse due
to the brain dead way Firefox 3 handles invalid SSL certificates.

For the non geeks, SSL keeps things secure and private, if your using Gmail your should enable SSL only access, now! If your webmail provider doesn't, you should request that they implement support for this immediately, otherwise, your email is just not secure!

Using the reader link from SSL Gmail in Australia, https://www.google.com.au/reader/view/?tab=my results in



Meanwhile, whilst Firefox needs to improve the way this error is handled, Google just needs to tweak their web server config, I am sure they can afford a SSL cert for www.google.com.au !

Update: Looks like this is a problem with google worldwide

Mapguide 2.0.2 - the viagra edition

MapGuide 2.0.2 was posted this morning, this is THE MUST USE build of MapGuide.

http://download.osgeo.org/mapguide/releases/2.0.2/

I did some testing with the first test build of 2.0.2 using our KL dataset. The result? I successfully seeded the entire map on XP using managed SDF's without the server falling over or producing a single error :) 30k tiles

The memory usage hovered around 60-63 mb, whereas with 2.0.1 it would
blow out to 600mb+ before crashing..

I did make two tweaks to the standard serverconfig.ini before testing

CacheSize = 1000 (was 100)
#DataConnectionPoolExcludedProviders= OSGeo.SDF,OSGeo.SHP

This is really great news, as prior to this release I was having a lot of trouble with MapGuide server stability. I haven't tried the final build just yet, but it includes a newer version of FDO than the build I tested, which might even resolve the issues with the GDAL provider crashing :)

More unethical syndication of my blog

It's happened again, another company is abusing the works of CF bloggers for their own benefit.

They call themselves "Internet Marketing Experts" but others would call them freeloaders or unethical cheapskates. There is nothing wrong with traditional aggregator sites, such as cfbloggers or the planet style sites like planet osgeo

Whilst googling up on the use of Malcom Turnbull's new nick name Truffles , I found this link when I searched for truffles emo, the first link was mine and the second was this unattributed rip off

This is blatant content stealing, not properly attributed and should not be indexable by search engines. They have a lot of CF bloggers on there as well.

There is no excuse for this. Period, no discussion. If your smart enough to program a website, you should be smart enough to realize that this is wrong, really wrong.

I know people are hard pushed for idea's, but writing yet another blog aggregation site and then SEO-ing it to compete with the original authors site's is really scraping the barrel, dumb... Even McCain could understand that!

I am going to fire off a stern email to sales@f9group.com

Truffles replaces Emo Man

Over at crikey, I noticed they have started to call Malcom Turnbull Truffles which I think is worth around of applause. here here!

The announcement of the new Shadow Ministry is showing the lack of depth in the Liberal ranks at the moment. Julie Bishop as treasurer is a poor choice, she is such a dull and boring communicator at the best of times, making her talk about economics surely contravenes several of our human right's treaty obligations.

Helen Coonan, previously Minister for Communications makes for an interesting choice for Foreign Affairs, I will need time to develop an opinion on this one...

Poor old Tony Abbot, Religious Saviour of the Australia Parliament who is still the most fun character and my favorite interviewee on Lateline, missed out...



Meanwhile Kevin was on Rove, the moose comment is brilliant...

As Andrew Bartlett said, they should Give Petro a go!

I'm feeling all warm and fuzzy as well after the return of The Australian's liberal party cheers squad. As many have pointed out, statistical error is not momentum :)

Fighting page zoom with tiled maps

I like the automatic page zoom with Firefox 3, it rocks, for text. It kinda sucks with images as they get stretched and it looks rubbish and blurred. This is a problem with tiled maps, as they just shouldn't be scaled like that.

There are a few workarounds out there but none seem great. I would like to be able to disable page zoom, or even better would be detecting the page zoom and then maybe decreasing the tile grid size so that when the tiles are zoomed to match the screen resolution, they actually end up at the same resolution.

Can anyone shine some light on this issue?

New FusionHDTV release 3.68.04

I'm just downloading it now......

Lets see if it crashes less often.....

the release notes do mention other minor bugs, cough! :)

Bitten by Patch Tuesday

Well, thanks to the team at Microsoft, my laptop is screwed and needs a re-install....

It stopped booting properly after the recent batch of Microsoft Patches, grrrr

What i find really annoying is that system restore didn't work as this morning,
after a system restore yesterday, I find M$ has reinstalled the patches, despite
automatic updates being turned off......

Basically it hangs on the "Windows is starting" screen, safe mode still works

Please enjoy the lack of swearing, it took some self control...

Update: Coldfusion wouldn't start either and after the system restore, gdiplus.dll has been renamed.... more here

CFTREE Variable DEBUGGER is undefined. help!

I get this error working Coldfusion ajax tag CFTREE, i have googled around and looked thru the CF docs but I couldn't find the answer... anyone?

Does anyone have a working example of the error handler?

update:1 this url parameter causes it... "_cf_nodebug=true"

I also had cfdebug set as a url parameter on the calling page

update 2: I was looking at CFTREE and not the tag I was binding with which is
cftreeitem that has a onBindError parameter.

I can now nicely display "500 Variable DEBUGGER is undefined"...

The sheer irony of google chrome

Calling your speedy browser chrome is ironic, as most people seem to think the UI sucks

I'm waiting for Chrome-Tab ( like IE-tab ) for Firefox.

I like their browser engine, but lets face it, the overall experience is a
bit like couch surfing compared to staying in a 5 star hotel...

Google started Chrome because they could make drastic changes, more so that they could within the Firefox community... sometimes the community knows better!

Location bar addon for Firefox

If you want to make this



look more like this



or even this



then try out Location Bar addon for Firefox 3 with these settings

Double Dissolution Election Down Under?

With Peter "smirk" Costello releasing a book next week, some old wounds are going to be reopened and the world famous "Emo Man" Brendan Nelson is already in total free fall... and then this weeks events in the Upper House just raised the temperature a notch or two..

Once again Australia has a new Senator Fielding, who acting in a rather undemocratic fashion. He blocked the government's attempt to raise the tax on Luxury cars, citing farmers and tourism operators as being unintentional victims.

Bob Brown, leader of The Greens criticised his lack of flexibility in negotiating with the government.

On Lateline the same night, Fielding acted like a rich, little snobby private school boy, showing little political nous.

Every child in Australia deserves the right to be picked up from school in a luxury 4WD which only attacts a 25% sales tax

Source: Family First internal mission statement

Due to quirks in our electoral system a man who received 80,100 votes can hold the government to ransom. Sure it's his right, but after watching the guy on lateline, I don't like him. He's even almost making Brian Harradine look ok, almost....

So the government can submit the bill again next week and if it's knocked back, suddenly we are starting to get into the realms of a Double Dissolution election.

There's no point trying to fix the mess left by Howard et Al, if your going to be dealing with prats like Senator Fielding all the time. If he keeps acting like a spoilt child, just call an election Mr Rudd, go on, do it.

It would be a nice finger gesture to Costello, that way we can have seen both Howard and Costello personally loose elections on behalf of the Liberal Party.

The Coalition have been pretty petty, over the last few months, the journalists are starting to get a bit short with some of the their "antics". At the moment the Opposition can get away with blue murder, policy wise, as even Nelson admitted recently.

They aren't the government and their populist policy of the week are not being taken seriously or critiqued. Looks like a turd, smells like a turd, I'd rather not taste it personally, thank all the same.

Force a Double Dissolution election Kevin, it's would be the ultimate public dakking of the Liberals in front of the entire country!

They deserve it, plus a lot of people would just so love to see that horrible Smirk properly wiped off Costello's face...again!

Plus there will be fall out from the US elections for sure... I reckon G W Bush is feeling a little lonely at the moment in the big old white house, after McCain's abandonment of his administration's record...

who's missing their deputy sheriff now? ... now there's a good baby :) suushhh

Efficiently using Oracle sequences which have increment set greater than 1

Some application's create sequences which auto increment by say 200, Map 3d does this for example with the ENTITYID sequence. It means Map 3d reads the sequence once and then waits until it has used 199 values before grabbing another sequence.

This can be inefficient if you loading data via a INSERT into SELECT approach, each row will up the sequence by 200, not really what your after.

Oracle's PL/SQL functions to the rescue

CREATE SEQUENCE SEQ
  START WITH 1
  INCREMENT BY 200
  MAXVALUE 999999999999999999999999999
  MINVALUE 1
  NOCYCLE
  NOCACHE
  NOORDER;
  
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION getseq( rn integer, incred integer )
RETURN number IS
calc_seq number;
BEGIN
  IF mod(rn, incred) = 0 OR rn = 1 THEN
    select seq.nextval into calc_seq from dual;
     RETURN calc_seq ;
  ELSE
    select seq.currval  into calc_seq from dual;
     RETURN calc_seq + mod(rn, incred);
  END IF;
EXCEPTION
  WHEN OTHERS THEN
     RETURN -1;
END;
/

-- populate currval for the session so the next query doesn't error

SELECT  SEQ.nextval from dual; 

-- handy way to get 30 rows from dual, using 10 rather than 200 to keep it simple  

SELECT  rownum, zac.getseq(rownum,10) seq, mod(rownum,10) mod_result, seq.currval 
FROM dual connect by rownum < 31;


    ROWNUM        SEQ MOD_RESULT CURRVAL
---------- ---------- ---------- -------
         1        201          1     200
         2        203          2     200
         3        204          3     200
         4        205          4     200
         5        206          5     200
         6        207          6     200
         7        208          7     200
         8        209          8     200
         9        210          9     200
        10        401          0     400
        11        402          1     400
        12        403          2     400
        13        404          3     400
        14        405          4     400
        15        406          5     400
        16        407          6     400
        17        408          7     400
        18        409          8     400
        19        410          9     400
        20        601          0     600
        21        602          1     600
        22        603          2     600
        23        604          3     600
        24        605          4     600
        25        606          5     600
        26        607          6     600
        27        608          7     600
        28        609          8     600
        29        610          9     600
        30        801          0     800
30 rows selected

Chroming with Google's Chrome, my impressions

After chroming around with Google''s new Chrome browser for a few hours and I gotta admit, my head is spinning a bit...

1. It looks too much like Vista on XP, wrong..
   
2. It's fast, super fast, but Firefox 3 still ain't too shabby, 
3. Tab's on top annoy me, scanning over my address bar and bookmark icons each time, and it means to much mouse movement compared to them FF3 style.
4. As an IE user it would be more exciting, but I am now used to FF3
5. The new tab start page is very cool..
6. A problem for developers might be that some things run differently speed wise and might fall over as a result, just like with QBASIC back in the dos days.
7. Microsoft must be really, really worried to be thinking anti-trust
8. What will the corporates think IE6 is getting crufty....
9. Remember, this is only the first beta

Honest have I spent a lot of time with FF and I like the 'weight' of it's browser chrome. I know where the page ends and the browser starts. IE7 & IE8 look distinctly like they couldn't decide what to do with the browser asthetically.  Safari feels wrong to me, it's too light.

Consider holding a piece of 70gsm paper in your hand to read, and then taking some 180gsm paper, what feels nicer? for my tastes i like the solid feel.

I'm still waiting for someone to revolutionise the UI for these wide screens displays, asthetically I prefer full screen windows, it's less noisy.  There is usually whitespace either side of a page, but even the changes with Chrome, it fails to use that space and instead persists with gobbling up valuble vertical space.

even thinking about the word Sidebar give me shivers..