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.