Crazy Apple Rumors updated the look of their site today in what would have to be one of the most disastrous site overhauls I’ve seen. The all new forums were instantly filled with a whole bunch of people complaining about the new look of the site. Fortunately, Crazy Apple Rumors being as it is, the conversation rapidly turned to the joys of having Masako (the CARS web designer and rumored to be most attractive and feminine) poke you with a fork – apparently she does that kind of thing a lot.

I was going to comment on how good it was to see the Queensland Government trialling E-Petitions, until I noticed the 12 month trial started in 2002 and they just haven’t bothered to update the website since. Sigh. On the plus side, the E-Petitions are still up and there’s one that’s still current, so I guess the trial was considered a success. Good stuff. You can view the currently open petitions here.

The Brisbane City Council in conjunction with the Queensland State Government are building a rather expensive Youth Recreation Centre across the road from the recording studio I record in. There’s very little information available about what they actually intend to do with it but since I’ve been organising quite a few youth activities lately I thought I’d see what the plans were and try to take advantage of the new facilities to make staging youth events easier.

I’ve been playing with Linux on my powerbook, mostly just for something to tinker with. Generally it runs pretty well, but I don’t have a lot of space on my internal drive and wanted to use my firewire hard drive for /usr. This is a major mission apparently. After many hours of compiling kernels with massive struggles in finding a set of options that will actually compile, I managed to build a 2.

There’s been a few comments to my rant on choosing the right language for the task that I wanted to comment on. Firstly the simple one from hammet: Dude, you can say you hate C#, not .Net. .Net is not a language. No, I definitely hate .Net. I still can’t tell you what went wrong with it or where to point the blame but my short spell of .Net programming rates as my most hated moments in computing.

It appears that Apple have killed the dogcow. A highly endangered animal that was taken under Apple’s wing and blossomed in the days before OS X, the last known wild Dogcow now appears to have died. The soul remaining vestage of Doggycowiness (sic) is TechNote 31 which now can only be found in captivity at Google (or is that cacheivity?). Sadly because Google doesn’t cache images, the actual Dogcow that was in captivity in TechNote 31 at Apple now appears to be dead.

I’d seen a link to this a few days ago and it was presented in such a way that it seemed like an intelligent discussion of the relative merits of C++ and Java – certainly the reply I read was. I didn’t have time to read it until now and I’m extremely disappointed. If I could remember who linked to that rant I’d probably give up reading their blog. I’m not going to bother rebutting most of the article, there are plenty of incorrect statements in it just as there are plenty of incorrect statements in every article like it comparing any two languages.

Sun released Java 1.4.2_04 – a bugfix release today. Reading through the list of fixed bugs I noticed this one (log in required). Here’s the bit that caught my eye: Expected results: Java would work for these tests. Note: Mature teen/TCP, Adult/TCP and Adult/modem are working for the same pages. Mature teen/modem is working when IE option Java: Use Java 2 v.1.4.1_02 is unchecked. Mature teen/modem is working when other JRE version (e.

I haven’t had a lot of time to continue writing my musical but none the less it is progressing. I’m pretty happy with the first act now and have a plan set out for the second. I’m a little concerned that it might be a bit depressing though. It can be tough to confront issues like adoption, abuse, homelessness and alcoholism without becoming very depressing. At the same time it’s important not to gloss over the issues or the whole musical just becomes too surreal or worse, becomes a Disney movie….

Things are rocking along with MarchFest 2004 though it, combined with product releases at work, have been keeping me extremely busy. On the plus side the performer list is now up at the MarchFest website. Information on the fashion parade and art gallery to come soon hopefully. Don’t forget to mark your diaries to attend on the 20th!

Some guys noticed that there’s RFID tags in US currency. All very scary and such, but there’s one quote that shows a bit of a lack of research: What we resent is the fact that the government or a corporation can track our ‘cash’. Credit purchases and check purchases have been tracked for years, but cash was not traceble until now… Maybe US currency doesn’t have this, but on every Australian bank note, there’s a unique serial number – has been for many, many years.

java.net blogger Malcom Davis comments on why you should use the Sun Java coding style. The first comment is the perfect example of “ego” that he talks about: Why not adopt the Sun coding conventions? Simple – because they are derived from an antiquated and BAD way of coding. There are very good reasons why C programmers moved away from the coding styles used by Sun, and the excuse that ‘modern IDEs have code colouring and brace matcing, etc.