Palegoldenrod

Western Australian man wins World Santa Claus Championship - News.com.au 27-Nov-2007

Shaun Micallef has returned to our screens in Newstopia on SBS - I caught it for the first time last night. Its great to see him with a show again - he is a comedy god among men.

Last night’s episode wasn’t bad - “Bhutto - the B is silent but she is not”; “John Howard - he’s tough on drugs, but whats he like off them?” . A secret treasure was the collection fake ads strewn between the real ones. Even more so because some of the satirical ones were sending up the real ones that had aired shortly beforehand, hehehe. Some were very well done: “Fanta - thank you Hitler”; “Inspector Herring”, russian cop who is an actual fish, working undercover - “Hey, whats that microphone near his dorsal fin?! He’s wearing a wire!”.

If you missed last night’s episode, it turns out that SBS is providing streamed video of the entire Newstopia episode for seven days. This looks like it is a regular event - each episode is available for seven days after it screens, but isn’t downloadable (d’oh). Still, its pretty nice of them. Although if you believe Shaun, SBS will take your details, provide them to the Chinese government and you will be taken for a long stay in prison because “that’s just the sort of service SBS provides”

Enjoy.

I don’t intend to encourage you to vote for a particular party, or want to know who you vote for, or even want to tell you who I vote for. But I’d like to make two points, and offer you more information.

Voting for Small Parties

Don’t consider a vote for a small party to be a lost vote. Even though that small party may not have a chance to win a seat in government, even though your vote will end up falling back on preferences (either yours or theirs, depending what you provide on the ballot) the initial count can help to indicate the populations opinion on certain high profile matters of policy etc. You may not be able to vote in someone other than Labor or Liberal (well, its unlikely) but you can send a message. Please bear this in mind.

In addition, election funding is available to parties that receive more than 4% of the initial first preference vote. This can be a useful tool for smaller parties to continue to operate and lobby for changes in your community and in government policy.

Specifying Preferences

On the Senate Ballot, you can choose to put a 1 above the line, indicating your preference of party. If that party gets knocked out, then the party decides where your preference will go. You can, however, choose to number every single box below the line. Most Aussies probably conisder that to be too much work. I’d suggest that taking 15 minutes once every 3 or 4 years is probably not too much work at all, and that it may result in a government that you are happier with. The section below provides resources to find out more about the candidates so you can even plan your numbering before you walk in there on the day - you can get out of there much quicker and be able to place all those numbers in boxes more confidently. Its your choice.

Being Informed

I realised that I don’t know all of the parties that are available for me to vote for, and I wondered why they didn’t distribute the ballot paper for review prior to the election. How else do I know who I can research or ask questions of? Well, they sort of do. You can review the entire candidate listing (and gain access to contact information for candidates) from the website of the Australian Electoral Commission.

Resources

• Candidate / ballot listing
• List of political parties
• Where to vote

Note: some parties may not have registered in time to be officially listed e.g. I know some friends who will find candidates for the Secular Party listed on the Senate Ballot, but not mention of the Secular Party specifically. If you are looking for a particular party and can’t find them you are best to check out their website to confirm their candidates.

The Problem

Scenario: You have an ASP.NET 2.0 website in IIS 6.0 that receives both http and http requests. Some people might link to the https versions of the page, but you really want Google (and other search engines) to only crawl http versions. There are relative links in the site, so you know that as soon as Google crawls one https link it is going to pick up the whole site. So as well as https links in the Google search results, you may also now have to contend with lower rankings because Google thinks there is duplicate content on the site (it sees the page in both http and https format).

You can see that Google recommends that you have a different robots.txt file for http and https, so that Google knows not to crawl the https version of your site. But how can you get IIS to serve up different versions of robots.txt?

The rest of this article is available at KleeneCode.net, where Amos and I are now posting all of our tech posts. You can read the remainder of this article here

Hey, this sounds pretty cool

Infoworld: World of Warcraft, meet Visual Studio

Welcome to the first “Peek @ World”, where I snapshot something weird and wonderful in the world that needs no explanation. Thus the absence of an explanation

Hackers Take Down the Most Wired Country in Europe - Wired 21-Aug-2007

They have blogging, they have a chat client (and chat functionality built into web-based gmail) they bought Blogspot, Youtube… it was bound to happen that Google looked in the direction of social networking.

They have released OpenSocial - no, its not yet another social networking site. Google has rightly realised that that particular market is well saturated (whew!). OpenSocial is an open API for social networking applications - an interface for accessing and providing information in existing social networking services. It is aimed at forming a common base between the already existing thousands of social networking sites and applications.

The rest of this article is available over at Kleencode.net where Amos and I are now posting all of our tech posts. You can read the rest of this article there.