Category Archives: Web sites

Web sites that I thought were eithor good, quite bad, or contained something funny.

Australian Internet Blackout WordPress Plugin

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Posted by Leefe on 23 January 2010 – 11:51 pm
Filed under Blog, Tech, Web sites
Tagged as , , , , ,

I have been a bit lax recently about posting to my blog, and updating the Conroy’s Christmas present list. But my spare time has been taken up learning to write WordPress plugins.

For my first WordPress plugin I present the Australian Internet Blackout.

This plugin automatically adds the necessary JavaScript to you blog to display the protest message to people visiting your site. With the hope of bringing the government’s censorship plans to a larger audience.

The Easy way to install:

  1. Go to the ‘Plugins’ ‘Add new’ menu in your WordPress blog
  2. Search for ‘Australian Internet Blackout’
  3. Find the plugin in the list returned (it should be the first one) and click ‘Install’
  4. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

The hard(er) way to install:

If you prefer to install things on you blog yourself you can.

  1. Download the Australian Internet Blackout plugin
  2. Unzip the plugin.
  3. Upload it to your blog’s plugins folder
  4. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

For more information about the protest please visit:

Which anti filter group should you belong to?

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Posted by Leefe on 13 January 2010 – 11:35 pm
Filed under Social, Tech, Web sites
Tagged as , , , , ,

Are you the Internet People's Front?One of the big problems is the anti filter campaign at the moment is its divided front. There is no clear leader giving direction to the campaign.

The No Internet Censorship site, run by the Australian Democrats, has an interesting article about this problem: ‘Taking control of the campaign against internet censorship‘. It clearly addresses the problem with having multiple bodies trying to run the campaign from different angles.

Although, it makes me think of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Here is my adaptation of The Colosseum skit:

Brian: Are you the Internet People's Front?
Reg: F*ck off.
Brian: What?
Reg: Internet People's Front. We're the People's Front of the Internet. Internet People's front, caw.

The article mentions that there are 3 political parties involved in opposing the filters: The Australian Democrats, The Greens, and The Australian Sex Party. And it asserts that one of these would be best to lead the campaign.

Brian: I hate Stephen Conroy as much as anybody.
PFI: Sssh. Ssssh, sssh, sssh, ssssh
Judith: Are you sure?
Brian: Oh. Dead sure... I hate Stephen Conroy and his Internet filters already.

I noticed they missed Pirate Party Australia. Though, reading PPA’s FAQ, I see that they are not yet a registered party. Hence the current membership drive to get the required 500 members.

Reg: Listen. If you really wanted to join the PFI, you'd have to really hate Stephen Conroy.
Brian: I do.
Reg: Oh yeah? How much?
Brian: A lot!
Reg: Right. You're in. Listen. The only people we hate more than Stephen Conroy are the f*cking Internet People's Front.

The underlying message of this article is good, but it also looks like political posturing. With The Democrats having no members in parliament since the last federal election.

My take on it all

In my opinion these political parties should take a back seat on pushing the issue. The Democrats are seen as irrelevant to current Federal politics; The Greens polarise people with their other politics; and The SEX Party is seen as representing that which Conroy is telling the public is bad about the Internet.

Their article also forgets to mention of the two non political party groups that are involved in the campaign: the Electronic Fronteirs Australia (EFA) and GetUP. Both of whom have had an important role in delivering the message to the public.

In my opinion the EFA has the best mandate for being the focus for the campaign. The EFA is an organisation ‘independent of government and commerce‘ and formed in 1994 ‘representing Internet users concerned with on-line freedoms and rights‘.

There are many sites that are campaigning against the filters. There needs to be one central hub, that people link to and that provides a clear direction to the campaign.

Conroy already has the jump on the anti censorship people. The anti filter folk don’t have time for a long Darwinistic evolution to find the best candidate, the creationists are currently on their crusade against the Internet. And a divided campaign will be easily swept aside.

Bookmarking in the iTunes store

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Posted by Leefe on 26 December 2009 – 11:14 pm
Filed under Mac, Web sites
Tagged as , , , ,

Do you ever find things in the iTunes store and think “I don’t want that now, but might be interested later”? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a bookmark feature in iTunes?

Well its good to see that I am not the first person to want it. Back in 2003 Chuck Toporek wrote an iTunes store feature wish list, with bookmarking a feature high on the list. And even the idea of a wish list so people could buy you stuff.

Then I came across kirk’s suggestion of dragging out urls to make webloc files. But I really don’t want to have to file the bookmarks somewhere else. A directory of bookmarks it not that easy to manage, of space efficient.

The best idea I saw is from AgingGeek of creating a playlist in iTunes and dragging songs to it from iTunes store. That this should create a list if files you are interested in. Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear to work in iTunes 9.

So it looks like we are back to the drawing board?

Add to Wish List menu optionNo, not completely. As of iTunes 9 there is a small drop down menu arrow next to the ‘buy’ button for albums and tracks, which has an ‘Add to Wish List‘ option.

So, now there is a wish list. But how do I access its contents? And where did my Shopping Cart go?

The Wish List can be access via a link (hidden) right at the bottom of each iTunes store page.

The Shopping Cart has gone. It is no more. Only 1-click shopping is offered these day in the iTunes store.

From iTunes help:

IMPORTANT:Only 1-click purchasing is available. If you were using Shopping Cart in earlier versions of iTunes, the contents of your Shopping Cart can now be found in your Wish List.

So, Apple have decided that a shopping cart gave you too much of an option to back out of purchases. And moved to only having a 1-click purchase model. Cutting down on the ummers and ahhers.

IMPORTANT:All sales are final. You can’t cancel a purchase after you click Buy or Buy Now.

Some like the new iTunes, and gave it a good review:

And others detest the new iTunes store interface:

Personally, I think hiding the Shopping Cart as a Wish List at the bottom of the page is a not very user friendly.

I still want a way to Bookmark songs or albums. Much like you do in a web browser. That would allow you to categorise and file your bookmarks, not have them all dumped in one list.

As the iTunes store is really just a web site (using iTunes as its browser). I don’t see why this would be hard to implement (I presume that iTunes uses the same web technology as Safari). It just requires some realisation from within for the need to change.

Q: How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Only one, but the light bulb has to want to change.

Conroy’s Christmas present, Internet censorship #nocleanfeed

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Posted by Leefe on 17 December 2009 – 7:07 pm
Filed under Links, News, Social, Tech, Web sites
Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

Stephen Conroy has delivered his Christmas present early, ISP level Internet filter. Tuesday afternoon the government announced that was giving the green light to its controversial censorship plan. And Conroy stated that we can look forward to legislation being introduced next year, ahead of the election.

Yesterday news sites, blogs and twitter erupted in a furore over the plans. Below are some articles on the subject I though were interesting:

Read More »

SMH has coffee problems

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Posted by Leefe on 2 August 2009 – 1:07 pm
Filed under News, Web sites
Tagged as , ,

SMH has coffee problemsThis morning the Sydney Morning Herald site seems to have had a few problems. The homepage displaying pages of Java error messages in place of articles (in a nice bright red and yellow).

At all seems to have been rectified now, but I can see what the problem may have been… It looks as though the writer of the article Infiltrating the party womb drunk a little too much coffee, leaving the rest of the site short.

Are you a twit about trends?

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Posted by Leefe on 3 July 2009 – 10:31 pm
Filed under Tech, Web sites
Tagged as , ,

With the recent death of Molly Sugden, twitter has been abuzz with tribute tweats to her. The hash tag being used is #MrsSlocombesPussy which, as you can see, displays no search results. Although, without the hash, MrsSlocombesPussy displays a list of tweets.

twitter-trendsAre you being censored?

Although at first it looks that way, apparently it is not the case. Just a technical limitation. The search with the # is 17 characters long, and a twitter search can only deal with 16 characters. Hence the unhashed version works.

Why is twitter being spammed?

Interestingly TechCrunch picked up on this. And, with out doing any due diligence, declaired it as spam. Of course, the general public decided to correct them (and put the boot in at the same time for their sloppy checking).

So, no spamming/gaming of twitter going on here. Just a case of technical limitations and bad reporting.

One tweat for all the trends..

But all this got me thinking. How many trends can you fit into one tweat and still have a readable message?

Ok Rove, Public Enemies say Goodnight at #iranelection to Michael Jackson feeding #moonfruit to #MrsSlocombesPussy

I managed to get most of the ones listed in CT’s offending image, 7 of 10. Maybe I’ll have to try again tomorrow and see how many of the current trends I can get into the tweet. :)

Pirate Bay sunk

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Posted by Leefe on 20 April 2009 – 11:44 pm
Filed under News, Tech, Web sites
Tagged as , , , ,

The Pirate Bay  court case if over, and the owners of the service have been marched down the plank. The four were found guilty of promoting copyright infringement (2, 3).

Now, are the users of Pirate Bay to be deprived of their bits of torrent?

Well apparently not. The owners foresaw this as a potential ending, and distributed the servers far and wide. So, despite the verdict, all the users can still sail the high seas, and go where their bandwidth will carry them.

No Japanese slogans for TypeTees

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Posted by Leefe on 31 January 2009 – 11:31 am
Filed under T-shirt, Web sites
Tagged as , , , ,

Have you ever gone looking at Threadless? There are some nice T-shirts there. It is a community driven T-shirt site. People submit designs; they get voted on; and if the votes are enough they get their T-shirts printed (& US$2000).

Since I don’t have time to do up designs at the moment I thought I’d have a play with it’s sister site, TypeTees. Similar deal, but this time you submit slogans to be voted on. Though, since they are so easy to submit there is a lot of chaff with the wheat.

So, I thought I’d start with some Japanese, something different from the rest. Unfortunately my initial attempts produced errors, the slogan was too long.

ねこと
いぬが
ふったら
かえります

There is a 65 character limit on slogans, and TypeTees converts the input box to HTML escaped Unicode. So at 8 letters per Japanese character it is a bit long. Limiting you to a max of 8 characters (65/8=8.125).

My next try was a nice short enter in Katakana.

ファーキュ

And it was accepted without error. Unfortunately TypeTees displays the slogan as HTML entities. :(

& #12501;& #12449;& #12540;& #12461;& #12517;

Which is unlikely to get many votes.

It is a pity that TypeTees has a limited character set. I’ll just have to go and use Japanese slogans elsewhere.

Fahrenheit 451 staring Stephen Conroy

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Posted by Leefe on 15 November 2008 – 2:08 pm
Filed under Movies, Tech, Web sites
Tagged as , , , , , , ,

Fahrenheit 451 staring Stephen Conroy

For those that can’t read all the text on the movie poster:

presented by
OFFICE OF FILM AND LITERATURE CLASSIFICATION

Stephen Conroy as Guy Montag

Fahrenheit 451

2009?

staring STEPHEN CONROY and STEVE FIELDING director AUSTRALIAN COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA AUTHORITY producers APATHY, CONFUSION and KNEE-JERK REACTION executive producer AUSTRALIAN TAXPAYERS distributor NATIONAL BROADBAND NETWORK

R18+ May not be available on the Internet in Australia

So, how did I come to make the image?

I went looking for information about lists of banner books in Australia. One of the points stressed about the censorship regime of the previous government (but not that of the new one) is that while the list of banned books is available (or you can test for them), but the list of banned sites is not.

It was interesting to see that ‘Fahrenheit 451′ was amongst the lists I found, because of coarse language used. Which sparked the above poster.

The current government is trying to impose a blank filter on all Australians. This is despite the reports received about the effect on network speed, and the unreliability of filters.

Perhaps the movie should be called Centigrade 435 after the temperature at which network cables ignite?

(Network cables have a PVC covering, which has an ignition temperature of 435C)

Commentary about censorship in Australia:

Some interesting sites about book banning:

Australian Net filters may block porn and gambling sites

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Posted by digg on 27 October 2008 – 1:23 pm
Filed under News, Web sites
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Family First Senator Steve Fielding wants hardcore pornography and fetish material blocked under the Government’s plans to filter the internet, sparking renewed fears the censorship could be expanded well beyond “illegal material”…

read more | digg story