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