Perth City Council Fails Disabled, General Public Responsibility

Way to FAIL, Perth City Council!

Took these pics today at PRAWNHEADS lunch .  On our wheelchair/stagger from food overload/walk from the Saigon  restaurant to the Dome coffee shop, the wheelchairs nearly got stuck in:

... some nice traps that were even hard to walk through, I can only imagine how nerve wracking it would have been for the people in chairs.  There is no alternative access, and also this is a now covered-over Telstra connection pit.

That's two photos, two resounding FAILs - you may not obstruct access to disabled person nor may you fail to provide some means of disabled access.  This site failed on both counts of that, as there are no ramps by the kerbs for wheelchairs, and there are those holes in the footpath endangering people who use shairs and mobility scooters.

Second resounding fail, and actually totally illegal and punishable by hefty fines, is in the first picture, obstructing a public telephone booth is an offense that can cost up to $10,000 per phone.  Thats's $20,000 worth of FAIL right there.

More picture among the last few on this album on Picasa , you can see they've blocked off about 40 metres along each street, blocked off public phones, provided no access for disabled people, and it's been in place for weeks now, it's not a one day disturbance.  Perth City Council needs their asses kicked over this!

LiFi?

Honey!  Turn the light back on, I was just downloading!

How's this for a very clever idea?  This is pretty clever.  Put the network transmission and the control circuit in the light bulb.  Things that are not so hot are the power vampire effects of electronics in each bulb, even a few milliwatts of radiated signal can cost a few whole watts of energy, and of course there has to be a signal receiving portion of the circuit switched on for a definite period every few milliseconds to capture any commands that come along in case the light and the wireless AP are both turned off.

And before anyone says "they will switch it off when not in use, dummy," I refer you to the light switch in their diagram which mentions it will provide "encoded data - on/off" and that means the power on power off signals will only put the LED bulb in a kind of suspend mode, not switch off current altogether.

The other thing I can think of is a bit more prosaic.  Even LED bulbs will fail from time to time, and that means some areas will be without light - and without network coverage.  I can still work at my desk if the lights go down to quite dim, but I couldn;t do much if my network connection vanished.

Someone At Google FeedBurner Please Read This!

RESOLVED: Problem resolved. How?  Used IE.  And FF.  In fact, it seems almost any browser other than Google own Chrome, works just fine with their FeedBurner pages.

How's this for fail?  Google bought FeedBurner, right?  I've had a FeedBurner account for about a year beforehand, everything worked just fine, I have my blog on another Google acquisition, blogger.com, and the ad code fitted right in the sidebar code for the site.

Then I saw a bit on the FeedBurner site or support pages, you could now link your FeedBurner account to your Google AdSense account and save a lot of mucking around and loading up pages with multiple lots of code etc.  It all seemed to make sense.

Until I went to do it.  The only way to do it is to go to the FeedBurner contact page, and the only link there is a link to submit your FeedBurner account name and your Google account name so they can link your accounts for you.  That was about a month ago now, and there's been no follow-up whatsoever.

Apparently, at any rate...  Because weird things are now happening:

Now a check of my FeedBurner stats yields 0 subscribers, - reach, yada yada.  For all the feeds...  I figured something pretty simple has to be wrong, go to the feed setup tabs for one of the feeds.  "Site stats are not active for this feed."

So I click on that link hoping to figure out why the one reason for me to use FeedBurner would be switched off.  Down the bottom of the form is a button that says "SAVE".  And next to that is the text "This service is always active."  Damn I wish someone had told the sidebar about that.

Meanwhile, clicking on the Statistics tab again brings up the subscriber stats.  For a second, then when I reload the page it's all zeroes and dashes again...  *sigh*  All this, mind you, has only started happening since I stupidly submitted my account and email to Google because they didn't trust me to be smart enough to do this on my own, but were too ignorant to actually tell me if they had done it, were going to do it, or had just lost my request among a million others.

Go back to FeedBurner Support pages, oh yeah - "and the only link there is a link to submit your FeedBurner account name and your Google account name so they can link your accounts for you." how could I forget that there IS NO WAY to contact FeedBurner Support?  So I go to the FeedBurner blog , hoping they have comments switched on.  Yay!  They do!  I may be able to ask in a comment why there's no support at all for anything at all...

Until I open the latest (several months old) blog article and trail down the comments, which are now closed, so I can't actually enter anything.  Oh - and did I mention that the blog is not hosted on blogger.com?  Hehehehe, right down the bottom of the page is this little gem:

"Powered by Movable Type 3.2"

Maybe Google needs to take ownership of their property and do some of the scut work instead of just developing Chrome-y Androids and invading people's Streets...  %)

Open letter to Kevin Rudd

I wonder how hard it would be for Australians to demand a new election?  I thought I liked what K-Rudd stood for, initially, until I realised how little he carries in the way of testicular fortitude.  But right at this point, I'm less for a re-election and more for a taking down of the existing government.  It needs to be dismantled - to remind it that it's the representative of the people, not the lord and liege thereof.  That went out in Middle Ages England and is no longer appropriate here.

What other country has as much budget surplus, as much raw income, as many resources - and lets its old folks live on cat food?  What other country has so many people working and bringing in foreign trade dollars - but lets the banks and petrol companies run amok amongst them and rob them of their share of the wealth they helped create?

Mr Rudd - right now, you truly suck at everything, you are Teh Fail.

You might be doing wonderful things overseas, and I don't begrudge that overseas travel which the Libs try to tar you with, because we need a good foreign diplomat after the dismal pond slime that was John Howard.  At least you've taken a few firm stands against some issues, and have not been the obsequious  kiss-ass that he was.

I'm glad that you said you'd take the environmental issues bull by the horns, too.

I'm just not too pleased that you then patted said bull on the head and then (in Army parlance) retreated to a safe distance.  Because, waiting for the rest of the world to reduce their greenhouse footprint first may be all well and anal retentive, and may ensure that our precious producers are not "disadvantaged" in the short term, but in the long term it means we'll all be that much more stuffed.

You see - saying you're going to do something commendable and then only half doing it, that falls short of even being halfway competent.  Competent people don't fail or falter.

I'm a pensioner myself so the pensions issue does weigh on me.  But then, so does your decision not to put the boot into the banks and "strongly encourage" them to pass on that rate cut, because at this pension rate and without that interest rate cut, I can't afford both my rent and my food...

Also I find that your handling of your government in regards to the petrol price and excise issues has been less than I'd expect from someone who's supposed to be the head of the country and thus have some control over the political process.  Because that directly impacts how often I can drive to get my shopping and how many times I have to walk my emphysemic ass to the shops and then gasp and pant my way back with two shopping bags.

I realise that you have a lot of issues to sort out - but that's why we elected you.  You seemed to be a member of the PDA set, able to prioritise and multitask and deal with multiple issues.  The trouble seem to be that you've set yourself the goal of just coasting at each of the multiple tasks.  Right now, Australia has shown that despite your less than strenuous efforts at home, we can weather a global economic disaster better than almost everywhere else.  That's not thanks to you, that's despite you and your predecessors.  Australia is better than you and JWH have been.

We've for decades shown that we have brilliant ideas and technologies, which then end up overseas because of restrictions and funding shortfalls here at home.  That's something that has been due to lack of government support as much as it has been due to all other factors combined.

We have some of the world's most plentiful sunshine, making Australia an ideal place to harness clean solar energy.  Yet our solar rebates, while extremely good, could be much better.  And our subsidies for electric vehicles that could use that clean solar energy, are so poor as to be absent.  Our incentives to develop solar/electric vehicles are non-existent, the assistance for these technologies is poor, and even more poorly policed when given out.

We're now in an economic climate when faith in stock markets and banks and high finance has been shaken to the point where world economics will never be the same again.  A political climate where the United States is plummeting down the political top ten chart, where political power will soon boil down to what a country truly has in the way of resources, intelligent innovators, and a population willing to sacrifice in order to ensure that we have a world to pass on to our children and grandchildren.

In this climate, Australia could so easily become a respected world leader in every aspect.  Australia could be the example which other countries aspire to become.  Our technology could power nations.   Our policies could become the blueprint for a new world with a healthy future.  But it needs to start here, now.  Not all this stalling and pandering to the very organisations that precipitated the economic crisis, that caused the ecological crisis, and which stand behind every war or atrocity ever committed.

For all those reasons, Kevin, I'm asking you as a favour to me and the Australian people to either start acting in our interests or else resign and let's have another election.

Indie Pete's Label.

"Have fun using all that indie cred to pay the theoretical mortgage on your hypothetical house."
"More imaginary soup, dear?  No thanks, I'm figuratively stuffed!"
- Diesel Sweeties, archives

Now officially one of my favourite online reads , thank you Sara for finding it!

(close runner-up:  "Every song's a bonus track if you steal the album!")

Pi-house Rock

Dancing to a calculation? That's what artist and geek nerd Paul Slocum has done, turned a boring repetitive calculation into a very smooth dance track.  I'll let the article over at NoiseAddicts explain it.  I suggest you download the short segment but I bet you download the longer one too....

OpenID For Dummies? Yes It Is.

What a day, so much happening, so much goin' on!  I'm sitting in the bus watching really crap weather outside, so I'm refreshing my news page often.  That's led me to a few sites to investigate stuff and research further, then post.

Now - this.

I'd love it if their glowing prose were true, if the gorgeous pink fluffy bunnies cavorting in the clouds and green fields kind of optimism were justified.  But it just isn't so.  Speaking purely as an OpenID user, I can say that I've never seen a more shambolic implementation of something supposedly secure and user-friendly and open up the web to authenticated use.

My experience?  If I have an OpenID on one provider, there will be some sites that eschew all other OIDPs in favour of their own.  The reason for the distrust is simple - OID is hackable.  Not in the sense of Microsoft's wonderfully insecure learning aids for serious system crackers, but in the sense that everything is hackable given enough effort.  And they are not willing to extend that much trust to a competitor.

So I end up logging into some sites manually using the old userID/password authentication scheme anyway.

Then there's the whole "name as a URL" thing.  I've used my email address for almost 15 years, now I also have a URL.  So I have to remember a URL when I want to log into an OID enabled site.  Now here's a thing...  When I go to a new site that requires authentication, they ask me for my OpenID URL...  Before, I'd just type a username like "cyclic57" and a password like "shamb0l1C" and that would be that.

Signup info like addresses and so forth, you ask?  Even on OID enabled sites, I get asked to enter that crap again and again - that ole trust issue, I'd say.  So there's no advantage to me in that, either.

Now I go to another site, one I've previosuly logged into with OID.  Nine times out of ten, I have to type in my OID URL.  Dunno why, but it's my experience more often than not.  So instead of typing cyclic57 shamb0l1C I now have to type in http://myOpenIDProvider.com/cyclic57...  Lovely.  Double the typing, for a "convenience."

And that generally takes me to the OIDP loging screen where I have to type in at least my password, anyway.

Oh and that's not the end of it.  Remember how some applications will only allow certain OIDPs?  Well, so to use all my web applications, I now have three OID URLs and passwords to remember.

So - simple its' not, easy it's not, and convenient it's not.  Given the way some application providers won't accept certain OpenID Providers, it's not even very open. Summary?  Its definitely still at the for dummies stage.

McMarketforce?

Think about the figure for the USA stock market bailout.  Seven hundred billion dollars - $700,000,000,000 - that's a lot of money.  I can expect to earn around $3,000,000 over my working life.  That makes the bailout worth the entire life earnings of about one quarter of a million people in similar circumstances as myself.  If the whole world were to shoulder this bailout, it would cost a few hundred dollars per each man woman and child alive today.

Then too, the news that the market has lost $1.2 trillion, ($1,200,000,000,000 !!!) in one day's trading.  That's half a million people's entire life output, or several thousand dollars per person alive today, or several tens of thousands of dollars per person in the USA.

I'm mentioning the whole world because the stock market is a global phenomenon and it directly or indirectly or tangentially affects every person alive.  Even though a select few billionaires have reaped the profits and many of those billionaires are citizens of the USA, the money came from my pocket and yours and from the misery of some child in Uganda who missed one too many meals due to extreme conditions of poverty...

I would like to say that, if the senate approves a bailout plan for the relevant banks and institutions, that they make it a condition that this money is repaid in full.  But not to the government - rather, donate it to projects devoted to cleaning up the mess we've made of the Earth.  I'd rather my hundred dollars went towards that, thank you.

When you consider the sheer abstractness of $1.2 trillion and the irrelevance of a sum that large to anything pretty much anyone else does in our day to day lives, it can lead to a decided lack of confidence in stock markets in the future, perhaps leading to the decline of a system of economics which obviously has no accountability and does not scale well.  It can also give you an inkling that the biggest stock market crash in the history of the stock market is maybe the death knell for a great many other "established" things.

Such as USA's importance as a world power:  Already considered to no longer be relevant to many countries, the USA has stretched its defense forces far and wide, made itself a laughing stock by electing Puzzled George, and now it's stock market has a lower credit rating than McDonalds.

Other markets, other countries, are proving much more relevant, much more powerful, and it seems that perhaps a shake-up is inevitable now.  China and India each have larger populations, and look how far-reaching the China Milk Crisis has rippled, to almost every place on the globe.  And most countries above Third World now have better economies than the USA does.   Meanwhile, Russia is rattling swords at the USA and basically saying "g'wan - we dare yaz!" to it's 50 mile distant "super"power neighbour over Georgia.

And don't forget that the USA are in all seriousness accepting life under a political system where a housewife with aspirations, a housewife whose foreign policy revolves around "well, you can see Russia from here," could conceivably become the second most powerful person in the USA.

In this atmosphere, with food and other resources falling short of "sustainability", the shake-up is not only a possibility, it's almost an ironclad certainty. Wherever you stand on these issues, a stand is definitely going to be called for.  Stand on the side of the Earth, because no matter how many "stockmarkets" you dress it up in, that wealth ultimately comes from one place and one place only.  And you're standing in it.

Time, Space, and Weirdness.

What should one do when something spooky happens?  Our scientists take notes and observe.  It's an interesting thing for them to find, an object that just appears one day and then disappears a few months later.  Personally, I'd be very spooked.  I am very spooked.  It's not the first irrational or out of place object I've heard about that's kicking around out there...

How does a destroyed mothership sound?  Just that, well, we can sort of trace the rise of our particular species back to relatively recently, and before that, totally different but similar species.  Homo habilis, neanderthals, cro magnon - there's a discontinuity in our lineage.  Quite coincidentally I'm sure, there's a ring of debris on the outer edges of our solar system which at least one respected scientist I recall as saying could be debris from a moon or possibly a large spacecraft, and which that scientist also theorised may have arrived there in relatively recent times astronomically.

If I was going to seed a world with my successors or my food animals or my science experiment, I'd do that.  Park the mothership just outside the system, make sure there's a planet with conditions and creatures similar enough to my seed stock, make sure the colony was growing, and blow up the mothership.  I'd send observers from time to time of course.  Can't help if they become known as gods or something, just have to hope the seed stock forgets quickly.

And where would those observers stay in between appearances?  Well away and out of sight.  Until the day they come back and find:

(And this is also a story I had told to me and the source of which I have no intention of revealing)
In the late 60's to mid 70's, a satellite named Imp-D was launched and operated.  Something at launch caused Imp-D to have an orbit that didn't end up captured by the moon as was originally intended, and Imp-D was put in a wildly elliptical orbit.  One of the fun things to do with Imp-D was to see which tracking station could track Imp-D the farthest out along its apogee, and bring back telemetry data from it.  And one station tracked Imp-D out the farthest anyone ever had, and picked it up coming back at farther points than all the other tracking stations.

There was a lot of good-natured rivalry and competition between tracking stations, which is why none of the other tracking stations thought much when the champion station said that it might also hold the record for being the last station to track Imp-D, as Imp-D had "stopped" in its tracks, out near apogee.  But then other tracking stations aimed for where Imp-D would first come close enough for them to track - and there was nothing, just empty space...  (Tracking stations had to wait their turns to take a crack at Imp-D due to the Earth's rotation - but they knew where to aim their dishes for all the different satellites.  Imp-D just wasn't there.)

Then, 24 hours later, Imp-D appeared as though it had never left it's orbit.  And the best theories anyone came up with was that someone or something had held Imp-D, realised that the seed stock had somehow mutated into something new and different, and put Imp-D back on orbit in order to avoid detection.  Had it not been for the little tracking station that could, they might well have gotten away with it.  Imp-D tracking wasn't an official thing, it was more an informal competition as far as I've been able to ascertain.  And, having heard this way back in my teens, I think it has prepared me to think in terms of not what if we find signs of aliens, but  when we finally find signs of aliens.