Gotcha!

Putting the temporary message at the head of each new post has worked a treat, though I did have to reword it so people on legitimate aggregators like Pinkboard didn’t get the wrong idea. What happens when I fill the first five lines or so with an instruction to report a blog scraper to Google Adsense may be seen below:

Sprung!

While I slept

There have been 115 visits to this blog and Oz Politics since midnight; it’s now around 8am. They come from all over.

I wouldn’t mind being naked

Today’s Herald has bare facts about ‘naked DSL’.

Information control in this digital age

From 2009 students in the NSW HSC Standard English Module C Texts and Society Elective 1: The Global Village will have the option of closely studying Wikipedia. That, I think, is an excellent idea. Intelligent critical study of this extraordinary (and still extraordinarily valuable) resource, and of other aspects of the internet, seems to me something that should be mandatory rather than elective.

Here in Australia we have just been told something that really should not surprise us: PM’s staff edited Wikipedia.

STAFF in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet have been editing Wikipedia to remove details that might be damaging to the Government.*

A new website, WikiScanner – which traces the digital fingerprints of those who make changes to entries in the online encyclopedia – points to the department as the source of 126 edits on subjects ranging from the children overboard affair to the Treasurer, Peter Costello…

Defence computers were found to have made more than 5000 edits to Wikipedia entries, including to articles on the “9/11 Truth Movement”, the Australian Defence Force Academy and even the Vietnam War-era Pentagon Papers.

Technology and tutoring

My coachee D, the only Chinese Rugby League player I happen to know, is studying Peter Weir’s Witness as one of his Standard English HSC texts. The only problem has been I do not have a copy, could not get one either from the video library or Surry Hills Library, and couldn’t find it in either of the DVD shops I go to.

“Not to worry,” said D. “My mate has downloaded it from the internet.” So on Saturday he came in with his memory stick (2GB) and I transferred the movie to my Toshiba. For study purposes only. To have attempted to download it from the internet via Unwired on my low-end Toshiba could have been a nightmare.

But then we had a problem. I couldn’t play it. OK, I later obtained a codec that enabled Windows Media Player to handle the format, but what I had was a silent movie, which is actually enough if you just want to examine the cinematic language of the movie, something we do plan to do.

More from Thomas’s travels

There are some great pictures of Gallipolli and various parts of Europe on Deus Lo Vult, and some very interesting personal commentary, especially on the Auschwitz-Birkenau series.

At the end Thomas writes:

This layout sort of sucks in terms of showing a link. It’s a light-ish brown in amidst all the black font. For the most part, I linked to photos on the word “this”. Sometimes it was specific words, like “Lone Pine” or “Gallipoli trenches”. Maybe, as you read, you should run you cursor over the line if you have trouble. If anyone does find locating links a hard task, say so and the layout will be gone.

Banned in China?

Remember when we all checked to see if our blogs were banned in China? See Found on John Baker’s blog, and in Marcel’s email. I said then I am told the Chinese nanny can be variable… So look at the last 100 visits here:

Internet angst, suicidal teens and aggrieved teachers

I take teenage depression and suicide very seriously indeed. One source of such problems is sexuality, and that aspect is covered on my GLBT page. More generally, I commend Reach Out, Beyond Blue and Bullying No Way.

Just lately after two “emo” girls suicided in Melbourne much attention has been drawn to the role of MySpace. Today in The Australian Jack Sargeant has some very wise things to say on this.

…There have always been young people who have felt hopeless, unloved, alienated and, yes, suicidal. And there have been all manner of often incorrect explanations proffered for such behaviour. The double suicide of Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier in Victoria is merely the latest to tweak media interest and inspire pointless armchair analysis. In this case, the media has focused on emo and MySpace.com…

Found on John Baker’s blog, and in Marcel’s email

First item: one of my favourite crime fiction writers has just died at the age of 60: Michael Dibdin Dies. I love the Aurelio Zen books.

Second item: Great Firewall of China:

You can use this site to check if your blog or website is available in China. I don’t know why you would want to do that, but maybe you do.

I am interested. Here is the result for this blog.

So, according to the test, is the English and ESL Blog, but a couple of hours ago, according to Sitemeter, visit #101,847 arrived from CHINANET Guangdong province network. I am told the Chinese nanny can be variable…

The third item: “Marcel Proust” emailed an interesting set of links on Zona Europa, beginning here. Two more are at the foot of that page. It requires considerable familiarity with Chinese history and literature in the past sixty years really to get what they are about, though they also bear on the phenomenon above. I was especially interested in the second page as in my 1994 book From Yellow Earth to Eucalypt I used the wonderful poem “If Lu Xun Were Still Alive”. Lu Xun was a great 20th century Chinese poet and essayist of the Left who is still much revered in China, deservedly so; he was also, it may be argued, fortunate enough to die before the Communists came to power.

Strange maps

Very interesting blog this one: Strange Maps, today’s Top Blog and also Top Post on WordPress for 97 – Where (and How) Evolution Is Taught In the US. This is the map; go to the Strange Maps blog for commentary and over 300 comments… The particular entry is also linked to the map below.

That previous entry did amazing things… (update 5 April)

Visitor #100,000 arrived during that…

Can’t tell who as Sitemeter only gives me full details of the last 100 visits, and it’s now on 100,150…

2 hours later

… make that 100,566! Now this blog is #6 on WordPress Top Blogs! WordPress says there have been 1,396 views since 10 am our time today.

Next day: 5 April

Microsoft update today: what fun!

Any other XP users have this experience today?

STEP 1: Alert notice — updates available.
STEP 2: Go to Windows Update and eventually (you know what I mean!) discover just one little security update.
STEP 3: Download and instal update.
STEP 4: Restart computer.
STEP 5: Receive message: Rthdcpl.exe – Illegal System DLL Relocation
The system DLL user32.dll was relocated in memory. The application will not run properly. The relocation occurred because the DLL C:WindowsSystem32Hhctrl.ocx occupied an address range reserved for Windows system DLLs. The vendor supplying the DLL should be contacted for a new DLL.
STEP 6: Go to System Restore and go back to anytime before today.
STEP 7: Success! Message gone.
STEP 8: Check email and read from ZDNet/CNet: People getting Illegal System DLL Relocation after update .
STEP 9: Having read that, go to Microsoft Support as advised in Step 8 and read The Realtek HD Audio Control Panel may not start, and you receive an error message when you start the computer: “Illegal System DLL Relocation”.
STEP 10: Attempt to download appropriate patch.
STEP 11: Try again when validation of my XP package fails.
STEP 12: Success with second go of Step 11.
STEP 13: Download patch to fix the bad security patch.
STEP 14: Restart computer.
STEP 15: Sent back to Windows Update.
STEP 16: Eventually told by WU that the one little security update has already been downloaded but (thanks to System Restore doing its job at Step 6) is not installed.
STEP 17: Having installed the patch-repairing-patch, I figure it ought to be OK to instal the original security patch now…
STEP 18: Do so.
STEP 19: Restart computer.
STEP 20: All apparently sweet at last.
STEP 21: Write this entry.

Time taken: around 60 minutes. That’s OK. Nothing better to do.

As the Houston Chronicle Techblog (from whom I borrowed the picture) notes:

Patch Tuesday’s coming a little early this month.

News.com reported that Microsoft said Sunday it will move quickly to release a fix for the animated cursor flaw that was discovered just last week in December. Look for it to come down the tubes on Tuesday.

Microsoft normally releases fixes for its products on the second Tuesday of each month, which has come to be known as “Patch Tuesday.”

Or Wednesday here in Australia. Yeah, I thought it was early…

Yawning Bread (Au Waipang) is being rightly provocative…

One of the favourite blogs of all my favourites is Yawning Bread from Singapore. Here are a couple of recent challenges from Au Waipang. I might add that it is an improvement there that you can now reference individual entries, but don’t confine yourselves to these two. He writes beautifully and is often insightful.

1. Criminalise lesbianism, say Church leaders. Au Waipang is referring to the National Council of Churches of Singapore (NCCS). Post-colonial churches are quite often conservative these days, though “liberation theology” and “radical faith” are still alive in certain quarters.

How come I haven’t seen this before?

I am about to add a wonderful site to my blog roll, thanks to an email from Australian poet Peter Nicholson.

The Kamikaze Mind

The what? The Kamikaze Mind

… is the story of an astronaut who launched himself into a black hole. The recovered fragments of his mind have been organized alphabetically into a witty, whimsical, surprisingly touching and laugh-out-loud funny dictionary of a floating mind.

Richard Allen and Karen Perlman have sent these details:

This coming Monday February 26, Richard James Allen will be in Adelaide as part of: WRITING the STORY of the FUTURE, a one-day seminar on the author in the digital age organised by The Australia Council for the Arts. Richard will develop the notion of being a “shapeshifting” artist, that is inherently cross-platform in approach to creating work, by drawing on ideas in his recent UTS Chancellor’s Award-winning doctoral thesis and his cross-platform literary work for pages, performance, and phones, The Kamikaze Mind.

Riverbend has posted again

You can’t help worrying when she doesn’t. It is her first post this year. Click the screen shot to read it.