Daily Links – Page 11

09 November 2008

Links for 04 November 2008 through 09 November 2008

Stilgherrian’s links for 04 November 2008 through 09 November 2008, gathered via Twitter and spat onto the page with love and some lemon juice and garlic:

McDonald’s partners with earthwave to provide Australians with “Family Friendly” internet services | LinuxWorld: A company called earthwave has scored the deal to provide Australia’s McDonald’s stores with “clean” Internet links. That’s more than 720 locations.
How to nap | Boston.com: A nice overview of how to take effective nap breaks. I’d have congratulated Boston.com on using a good wide-screen format too, but discovered they’ve done it with images rather than live text on the page. Still, it’s good material.
What’s your profit : pain ratio? | Bad Language: Very apropos for me this week: an article pointing out that some clients simple aren’t worth the trouble.
Best advice I’ve heard all week | Wired Blogs: A reminder that humans are really very bad at assessing risk.
Tanner eyes web 2.0 tools | Australian IT: Australia’s federal government says it'll trial online public consultation through blogs and other social media tools. Good luck, guys, because the first thing you’ll have to learn is how to have an authentic conversation with people, rather than just parroting the party line.
Bush: “Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over” | The Onion: Written when George W Bush was inaugurated in 2001, this is a scarily prescient piece of satire. Well worth a read today.
Barack Obama’s acceptance: the transcript | Crikey: The full text of Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. Very powerful writing.
Not Quite Art | ABC TV: The official ABC website for Marcus Westbury’s series Not Quite Art including full downloadable files of all episodes of series 1 and 2 (provided you’re in Australia).
The next President of the United States | The Big Picture: Boston.com provides yet another glorious photo essay: this time it’s images of the president-elect of the US, some bloke called Barry.
Australian Internet Censorship | halans.com: Another powerful analogy to explain why centralised Internet censorship is wrong.
6 Nov 2008 – Liberation Day | Microsoft Australia: The Australian launch event for Microsoft’s Azure services platform. I blogged this live previously, and will soon write a more reflective post about it. This page now includes the video of Steve Ballmer’s speech.
Blog censorship silences free speech around the world | Worldfocus: Thirteen/WNET, the respected PBS station in Boston, blogs about Internet censorship censorship and surveillance around the world, including a link to little old me.
What Ray Ozzie didn’t tell you about Microsoft Azure | The Register: A nice discussion of the problems Microsoft will face selling its new platform Azure when compared with Amazon’s EC2 and Google’s App Engine.
750,000 lost jobs? The dodgy digits behind the war on piracy | ars technica: A nice discussion of where the numbers for “what piracy costs us” come from. This is American rather than Australian, but the points are still valid.
DVD pirating costing industry $1.7b: Debus | ABC News: Australia’s Home Affairs minister Bob Debus parrots the DVD industry’s claim that illegal copying (which they call “piracy”) costs $1.7B. The bogeyman of “child pornography” is raised to make it sound even scarier.
“Mankind Is No Island” | One Plus One Equals Three: The winning film in the Tropfest New York short film competition, shot using a mobile phone and found typography in Sydney and NY.

01 November 200803 November 2008

Links for 28 October 2008 through 31 October 2008

Stilgherrian’s links for 28 October 2008 through 31 October 2008, gathered using an automatic government-controlled thought-filter:

Annual Report 2007â€“08 | ACMA: The Australian Communications and Media Authority’s annual report for the financial year ended… four months ago. Trying to understand the emerging world by looking at documents like this is like trying to steer a fast car by reading traffic statistics from last week’s newspaper.
ISP-level Filtering Discussion part 2 | Whirlpool Broadband Forums: A women — a Christian and a mother — explains why she is against Internet censorship.
The perplexing Internet debate | On Line Opinion: Mark Newton, the network engineer who Senator Conroy’s office tried to bully into silence, has only become more vocal. Here he lists in clear bullet-point form the arguments the government has to counter.
ISP-level content filtering won’t work | ZDNet Australia: Three of Australia’s largest ISPs take a stand against the government’s plans to censor the Internet.
Clean feeds | ABC Unleashed: Mark Pesce’s piece about the Internet censorship debacle steps back and looks at how the last fortnight has been affected by what he calls “hyperpolitics”.
Keep Your Filter Off Our Internet | AWIA: “As the professional body representing people working across a broad spectrum of the web industry, the Australian Web Industry Association (AWIA) objects to the Government’s plans to trial ISP filtering, with a view to introducing it nationally.”
Have Your Bunny Repeatedly: Crikey cartoonist First Dog on the Moon’s contribution to the campaign against Internet censorship in Australia.
Twitter Goes Mainstream | WSJ.com: When a major mainstream newspaper says something is mainstream then it must be mainstream.
Copyright Infringement as Stealing: Pfft! | Brendan Scott’s Weblog: One important part of any propaganda campaign is framing the discussion to benefit your side’s arguments. Major copyright-holders are keen to frame their bad guys as :”thieves” and “pirates”. This post is a well-reasoned piece explaining why “theft” is an inappropriate and disrespectful use of language.
Eee PC 1000H HackBook | Flickr: Photo of Stephen Collins’ HackBook, an Asus Eee PC 1000H running OS X. Includes shopping list.
Why follow @Stilgherrian on Twitter? | Matt’s Musings: One smart person’s musings on why he chooses to follow people on Twitter. I’ll write a response some time this week. It’s amusing to be called “the Rove [McManus] of the Streaming Web”.
Sarah Palin Wardrobe Challenge: Kathryn Builds ENTIRE Wardrobe for the Candidate for Less Than $2500 | The Budget Fashionista: Just what it says. How to look just like the world’s most glamorous moose-killer without her $150k budget.
Multicolr Search Lab | Idée Inc.: Punch in a selection of up to 10 colours, and this’ll search through more than 10 million Creative Commons-licensed images on Flickr and show you those which match. Very cool and, I suspect, very useful.
50 office-speak phrases you love to hate | BBC News: A nice collection of 50 examples of annoying business-speak. It’s from June, but it’s still valid.

23 October 200825 October 2008

Links for 22 October 2008 through 23 October 2008

Stilgherrian’s links for 22 October 2008 through 23 October 2008, distilled from the finest ingredients:

How Not To Start A Corporate Blog: Telstra’s nowwearetalking Case Study | Richard Giles 2.0: Richard Giles has written a well-focussed piece about Telstra’s political-lobbying blog and the company’s behaviour, much of which overlaps with my own thoughts about Australia’s biggest telco.
Heather’s Creative Process | TwitPic: A nicely amusing diagram of one person’s “creative process”. I particularly like “Crying” in there.
Hangman, Spare That Word: The English Purge Their Language | TIME: A nice article explaining how difficult it is to purge old words from the dictionaries.
On-line transactions, streamed content, email and social networking signal changes in how Australians use the internet | ACMA: Latest statistics on how Australians use the Internet. Streaming video is now a top-2 or top-3 application, depending on the age group. 44% claim to have used the Internet to purchase airline tickets in the last 4 weeks. Can this be true?

22 October 200822 October 2008

Links for 18 October 2008 through 21 October 2008

Stilgherrian’s links for 18 October 2008 through 21 October 2008, slightly burnt at the edges:

The twisted language of politics | Bloghound: A nice post on the hypocrisy shown in the differing descriptions of Republican US Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin and Democrat Presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Send an e-mail message on behalf of someone else | Microsoft Office Online: The procedure for setting up delegated email access in Office 2007, e.g. a secretary having access to their boss’ email. I think it’s rather quaint that Microsoft still uses “e-mail” with a hyphen.
Use Outlook Anywhere to connect to your Exchange server without VPN | Microsoft Office Online: This is the procedure for making individual Outlook 2007 users connect securely to a remote Exchange server over the Internet. “Outlook Anywhere” is what used to be called “RPC over HTTP”. I’m tagging this because I’ll be making this work for a client shortly.
Configure Outlook Anywhere in Outlook 2007 | Microsoft TechNet: This is the procedure for making a group of Outlook 2007 users connect securely to a remote Exchange server over the Internet. “Outlook Anywhere” is what used to be called “RPC over HTTP”.
2006 Olympic Food Stealing Champion – My Dog! | First Dog on the Moon: One of First Dog’s more delightful (as opposed to deeply cynical) cartoons.
Cursebird: What the f#@! is everyone swearing about?: A live feed of everyone who swears on Twitter, with a nice animated effect when a new curse pops up. Compelling viewing.

15 October 2008

Links for 12 October 2008

Here are the web links I’ve found for 12 October 2008, posted not-quite automatically.

ABC overtakes Ten in audience share | AdNews: Australian television turned upside down! The traditional pecking order of Channel Nine, TEN, Seven and ABC is now Seven, Channel Nine, ABC and TEN. SBS is still in 5th place, but amongst the “main four” things are very different.
The Taxonomy of Logical Fallacies: A nice structural map of the various logical fallacies, with links explaining them.
Long Pig the Movie: I stumbled across this new movie website. It’s won a few awards so if you’re into horror it might be your thing.

09 October 2008

Links for 02 October 2008 through 06 October 2008

Stilgherrian’s links for 02 October 2008 through 06 October 2008, covered in peanut butter and cat fur:

Tragedy mars Leena’s run for governor | Bangkok Post: I wouldn’t have made as much fun of this story if I’d had the full details. While Bangkok governor candidate Leena Jangjanya was safely rescued from a canal durign a publicity stunt, her campaign manager Teerasak Sitanont drowned.
We can’t afford to keep Sydney running: Rees | smh.com.au: New South Wales’ new Premier reckons we can’t afford to run Australia’s largest city. That strikes me as odd. Where did all the money go? Is he looking in the right places?
I saved Telstra, says Trujillo | Australian IT: Telstra’s boss does bit of auto-hagiography. Given that he’s talking up how much he achieved, does that mean there’s some disaster about to be revealed?
What I want from an e-book reader… | Doc Holds Fourth: Steve “Doc” Baty’s requirements for a e-book reader. I particularly like “I can ‘loan’ my copy of a book to a friend by transferring it to their reader. If I do that, it’s no longer on my reader. This could also act as a way to give people Gifts.”