·:[ Leefe rates the world… ]:·
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When entering information in MySpace you are given the option to hide some things, but they break their option and show the info in other places. And it turns out that MySpace are ageist.

Hide your dob?

MySpace gives you the option to hide your date of birth. But it only hides the number, you can workout the most of it from other info shown.

In your profile MySpace shows your age and your zodiac sign. There appears to be no way to disable this. So its not that hard to work out a users dob within 30 days.

MySpace is ageist

As it turns out MySpace has a thing against people who are really old. I suppose it doesn’t fit with they ‘youth networking’ image to be 100+.

I found that if you set your dob as the earliest date available in the drop down menus, you get an error message telling you you need to be between 14 and 100 years old ro use the service.

So MySpace has something against really old people. I wonder what happens when 99 year olds click over to 100?

Test of age range handling

So, to test how MySpace deals with people moving outside their age range required I set the dob to a day less than 100, the oldset it will accept.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the age clicks over to 100. Will the user be kicked from MySpace? Will MySpace keel over from the age of its members?

Been having trouble getting X Windows forwarding to work from my Mac. It used to work, but hasn’t worked for a bit.

Turns out that from Mac OS X 10.4 stuff was changed and the ssh ‘-X’ flag doesn’t work for everything. You need to use the ‘-Y’ flag now.

• Configuring X Windows for Mac OS X 10.3 and beyond

Last night a number of suburbs had their light turned off at a quarter to five. And not by choice. It appears that some Energy Australia workers were ‘tinkering with’ the network in St Peters and ‘a fault occurred’ causing loss of power to 8 suburbs.

Power was lost in Enmore, Erskinville, Dulwich Hill, Marrickville, Newtown, Petersham, St Peters, and Stanmore to homes, shops and streetlights for about 1 hour. Though some places, like parts of Stanmore, took an extra half hour to see power return. Around 10,000 homes and businesses were affected according to news reports.

Shops had to close and people were ushered out of the Dendy cinema. But the beer in pubs kept flowing due the use of pressure rather than electricity.

Energy Australia spokesperson Kylie Yates tried to explain away the fault. But it would have been better if not caused in the first place.

Reminds me of a time a few years ago where the was a series of blackouts across Sydney caused by bushfires near power lines south of Sydney. Clouds of ash were causing the the lines to short.

Rolling blackouts are lots of fun when doing things in IT. Just remember to save often.

References:

1. Darkness the new black in inner suburbs (SMH, 23 July 2007)
2. Newtown the latest victim in Sydney’s spate of blackouts (NineMSN, 23 July 2007)
3. Power out on Sunday (Innerwest Angst, 23 July 2007)
4. Energy Crisis (nysa, 22 July 2007)
5. Technology is a btich (Miss Pedantic, 22 July 2007)

New space suits are being designed by MIT. Described as being reminiscent of Barbarella, they are figure hugging and use “‘mechanical counterpressure’ rather than gas to maintain Earth-like conditions for astronauts”.

Professor Dava Newman is working on ‘BioSuits’ that will give the wear more freedom of movement than current spacesuits. The envisioned use for the suits is planet exploration, on the moon or Mars, where the bulk of current suits tires the wearing more quickly.

But don’t expect to see these suits in use any time soon. Newman anticipates that they will be ready for use in about 10 years, in time for the manned expedition to Mars.

References

1. NASA’s sexy space suit (SunHerald,22 July 2007)
2. A space suit Angelina Jolie could love (tgdaily, 16 Jult 2007)
3. New Skintight Spacesuit Design Unveiled (National Geographic, 17 Jult 2007)
4. One giant leap for space fashion: MIT team designs sleek, skintight spacesuit (MIT news, 16 July 2007)

Photo of a crescent moon hanging over King St Church St intersection in Newtown.

Yesterday was cold in Sydney, today was even colder, if only by 1 degree. Today was the coldest day Sydney has seen in 21 years, with a temperature of 3.7 degrees C at 6:45am.

• Sydney has coldest July day in 21 years (SMH, 17 July 2007)

Photo from Enmore Park as night settles on the horizon. Using the huge tree in the park at the centrepiece with silhouettes of clouds over head.

There is a current baby boom in inner city Sydney. And it is putting strain on the resources that weren’t expecting it. Just ask RPA who down sized their labour ward before the boom.

If you walk around Newtown you will notice a increase in number of babies over the last few years. Other inner city suburbs have been seeing it too. My theory for the current boom has nothing to do with the PM’s baby bonus. It is a nice addition, but it was already going to happen. And it is nice to see that the Sydney Morning Herald agrees with me.

So why the current explosion in baby number in the inner city? Professional women. There are many women who focused on work rather than family (having children) now in their early to mid 30s, who have decided it is best to have children while they can.

The current explosion of births is just a flow on from a previous explosion. The kids of the baby boomers are now having kids themselves.

And if like living in the inner city why move out to the ‘burbs to have kids? In the inner city things are close to hand, public transport is good and you already know the people in your community.

People are choosing not to give up the rest of their lives just to have kids.

References:

1. Two lattes with the tin lids, please - hold the Hills hoist (SMH, 7 July 2007)
2. Urban crawl: pram army hits inner Sydney (SMH, 7 July 2007)

Having just finished all my Uni assignments I have a lot more free time now, and a need to de-stress. So what do I do that doesn’t require too much brain power and is not important?

Someone pointed me in the direction of Newgrounds. Go watch some silly movies or play web games.

Xeno Tactic
So I found Xeno Tactic. A defence game where you have to stop all the aliens from walking from one side of the screen to the other. On the first level they just walk from left to right, and on subsequent levels from top to bottom as well.

Turrets
You start with 80 gold and buy weapon turrets to wipe out the aliens. The cheapest is the basic Vulcan Turret at 5 gold. More expensive turrets include plasma, freeze rays and missiles. These have a greater range and/or rate of fire. You can also upgrade existing turrets, increasing their damage/range/rate of fire.

Each alien you kill earns you gold. The harder aliens earn you more of it. You can build new turrets or upgrade existing ones as you have the money. But building and upgrading takes time, and turrets won’t fire while upgrading.

Tactics
So you put down turrets, they shoot the aliens, should be easy. Well not quite so easy. Some aliens are quite tough and need to be shot quite a bit.

Since the aliens just take the quickest route across the screen and don’t attack the turrets, I found the best way to deal with this is to create a maze so the aliens walk back and forth next to the same turrets a number of times. Which also increases the turrets cost to effectiveness ratio. Only problem is the waves of flying aliens.

Overall
Over all an ok game, but very addictive if the you are into that sort of thing. I have spent a bit too much time trying to finish some levels.

Xeno Tactic
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/382321

(Started a month a go when I initially found the game, and only just finished now)

There is a competition for the new Transformers movie on the Australian SciFi channel’s web site. Unfortunately there are some quality control issues with the competition entry form.

What you need to tick
The form asks for your details, requires you to tick the ‘I agree to the Terms and Conditions’ checkbox, with an supposedly optional checkbox to join the Paramount Pictures Movie Club.

But as you an see from the screen capture, if you fill out all the required fields and tick the ‘YES - I have read and accept the Terms & Conditions’ checkbox you still get an error message.

The problem is that the Paramount checkbox is also marked required in the code, despite there being no indication that it is required. And why should I be required to sign-up for a opt-in mailing list?

<label>

<input type=”checkbox” name=”entry_additional_1″ value=”False” required=”true” title=”Terms & Conditions” />
YES - I would like to subscribe to the Paramount Pictures Movie Club</label>

Looks like a copy past job where they forgot to remove the required=”true” from the Paramount checkbox.

The above is the main problem I have with the competition entry form, but since I am posting errors I thought I might as well continue.

Verifying email
The JavaScript that verifies that fields are filled only checks there is something in the email field, not that it is a valid email address. The script the form is submitted to also doesn’t check the email address validity.

While they could say it is the responsibility of the entrant to check their details are correct. If you are going to check a field is filled you may as well check it is valid.

Squashed terms and conditions
The terms and conditions being squashed into five lines scrollable of text makes them a little hard to read. I understand that most people don’t bother reading them, but it is assumed that you have so it would be nice to make them easier to read.

Competition closed but form still available
I noticed the problems above a few days ago. Unfortunately I’ve only just had time to write them all up. As a result if you go to the SciFi competitions page you can no longer enter the Transformers competition. But if you enter the URL directly you still get the competition form.

Note: I noticed that they have now fixed the Paramount required checkbox. Not that you can enter the competition any more because it closed yesterday.