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The 2013 Federal Election

Seven hours ago I was handing out how to vote cards for the Greens at the 2013 Australian Federal election. I was hoping that either we would have a Labor/Greens coalition or an outright majority for Labor. Unfortunately we got a Liberal majority in the lower house and it looks like some extreme right […]

Ownership of a Club

Last night at the Annual General Meeting we had a motion to disincorporate The Linux Users of Victoria (LUV) [1]. The proposal was for LUV to cease being an incorporated society on condition that Linux Australia (LA) [2] accepts us as a sub-committee. As a sub-committee of LA we would elect our own committee to […]

Links August 2013

Mark Cuban wrote an interesting article titled “What Business is Wall Street In” about the failure of Wall Street to fulfill it’s stated purpose of providing capital for businesses [1]. His proposed solution is extreme, but so is the problem.

PopSci has an interesting article by Peter Nonacs about allowing students to collaborate (which is […]

Scratching a Galaxy S

Some years ago when I first got a LG U990 Viewty (which in some ways is the best phone I ever owned) I went swimming and left my phone in my bag. My phone happened to rest on my car keys and had vibration mode enabled, after a couple of missed calls I had a […]

The End of Kogan Mobile

Kogan Mobile has just announced that Telstra succeeded in it’s attempt to break it’s contract with ISPone and thus end the Kogan Mobile business [1]. Over the last few years there has been a trend for all Australian telcos to increase mobile phone costs. There are some pre-paid companies that offer reasonable deals for people […]

Google web sites and Chromium CPU Use

Chromium is the free software build of the Google Chrome web browser. It’s essentially the same as the Google code but will often be an older version, particularly when you get Chromium from Debian/Stable (or any other Linux distribution that doesn’t track the latest versions all the time) and compare it to getting Chrome straight […]

Nexus 4 Ringke Fusion Case

I’ve been using Android phones for 2.5 years and for all my phones (Sony-Ericsson Xperia X10, Samsung Galaxy S, Samsung Galaxy S3, and LG Nexus 4) I’ve bought “gel” cases. The gel cases are made of soft rubber which allows phones to bounce rather than break if dropped and also provide better grip (both […]

Religious Conversion

Today I was in the center of Melbourne and I saw two stands run by Muslims advocating their faith. They had a selection of DVDs and brochures to give away and seemed friendly enough for anyone who wanted a chat. I think that this is a good thing, if the majority of the Australian population […]

Links July 2013

Wayne Mcgregor gave an interesting TED talk about the creative processes of a choreographer [1]. The dancing in this talk is really good.

Melissa McEwan wrote an interesting article on whether being an “ally” to members of a disadvantaged group is a state or a process [2]. It seems to me that the word ally […]

Security is Impossible

The Scope of the Problem

Security is inherently complex because of the large number of ways of circumventing it. For example Internet facing servers have been successfully attacked based on vulnerabilities in the OS, the server application, public key generation, DNS, SSL key certificates (and many other programs and algorithms in use), as well as […]