Thursday, August 31, 2006
Lament: Stars! Supernova Genesis is no more
Stars! Supernova Genesis is no more. This (Stars! its predecessor) was one of the best games ever. I was really keen to hear about the sequel being in production. Then about them looking for a new publisher. Then...
Until I went googling today.
It's over :(
On the other hand, Jim Lane is said to be on-again-off-again working on Stars! 3... it might take years though...
Until I went googling today.
It's over :(
On the other hand, Jim Lane is said to be on-again-off-again working on Stars! 3... it might take years though...
Political Suicide By Hansard, Updated
The Criminal Code Amendment (Suicide Related Material Offences) Act 2005 is what is raising heckles, as far as I can gather.
To recap: the Hon. Sandra Kanck came out in state parliment and tried to demonstrate how stupid the amendment was. Then everyone kicked up a fuss.
Basically, the amendment says it's offense to have certain material and publish it on the internet. Here's a snippet from the actual amendment.
That's awesome. One party, Kanck, doesn't like the law because it tries to prohibit information being free under certain circumstances, and the rest of the state government doesn't like the law because it allows people to get away with speaking freely about suicide in order to cause debate!
To recap: the Hon. Sandra Kanck came out in state parliment and tried to demonstrate how stupid the amendment was. Then everyone kicked up a fuss.
Basically, the amendment says it's offense to have certain material and publish it on the internet. Here's a snippet from the actual amendment.
Huh? What?! What Kanck said was protected by the very amendment itself! What the vultures said was 'shameful' is actually catered for in law!
(3) To avoid doubt, a person is not guilty of an offence against subsection (1) merely because the person uses a carriage service to:
(a) engage in public discussion or debate about euthanasia or suicide; or
(b) advocate reform of the law relating to euthanasia or suicide;
if the person does not:
(c) intend to use the material concerned to counsel or incite committing or attempting to commit suicide; or
(d) intend that the material concerned be used by another person to counsel or incite committing or attempting to commit suicide.
(4) To avoid doubt, a person is not guilty of an offence against subsection (2) merely because the person uses a carriage service to:
(a) engage in public discussion or debate about euthanasia or suicide; or
(b) advocate reform of the law relating to euthanasia or suicide;
if the person does not:
(c) intend to use the material concerned to promote a method of committing suicide or provide instruction on a method of committing suicide; or
(d) intend that the material concerned be used by another person to promote a method of committing suicide or provide instruction on a method of committing suicide; or
(e) intend the material concerned to be used by another person to commit suicide.
That's awesome. One party, Kanck, doesn't like the law because it tries to prohibit information being free under certain circumstances, and the rest of the state government doesn't like the law because it allows people to get away with speaking freely about suicide in order to cause debate!
Grow Up, Children - Death By Hansard Isn't Very Likely
Rann slams Kanck as shameful? I don't fucking think so.
For those of you who don't know; the media appears to be having a field day. Everyone who can is playing up to public fears and ignorance, as well as spreading misinformation about a recent event. Sandra Kanck, leader of the SA democrats, used her privilege to point out the stupidity of a law in state parliment. The law prohibits publication of suicide methods on the internet. She detailed methods one can use to kill themselves, in protest.
Since it's in the constitution (state?) that every going on in state parliment is put into the 'hansard', and that's now published on the internet, she very cleverly demonstrated the foolishness inherent.
It was about then the vultures came out to play.
The point of having people in state government is to have challenging and well thought out debate around issues. Kanck used her privilege to highlight an issue she feels is being ignored. Euthenasia. She's damned right too. Its a basic human right, and preventing the publication of information is against the notions of free speech, not to mention utter insanity.
To make law only target electronic media makes it even stupidier. Firstly because it's on every fucking myspace, livejournal, and look-im-16-and-tragic blog in existence, secondly because the law doesn't ban me from writing it into a letter, publishing in a book, or yelling it from the rooftops.
In the interest of challenging this law, I'd like to help those in need of death. - jukeb0x.com advises to be sure to use enough gun - suicide is not something you want to screw up.
suicidemethods.net recommends you buy the book (just so you know what it looks like to screw up), or look at the pictures, Dmoz has a category on it, Wikipedia has a section, Satanservice.org has a handy cheat sheet.
My favourite, by far, is How to Kill Yourself Like A Man. Eat a tub full of beans. Very tough. Very manly.
Do you think, if I'm a young individual, or elderly person, I'm going to go onto the internet, pull up google, and type in "kanck + hansard record + suicide"?
Don't flatter yourselves, state government vultures!
The bigger picture: The right to die is a basic human right. Giving a person the ability to go to a doctor and ask for their life to be ended should be legal. It should be entirely the doctor's obligation to ensure on all levels that someone is not merely depressed, but does infact want to die. It should be possible for someone to ease their own pain with an easy method, rather having to attempt to shoot themselves (and possibly fuck it up).
Can anyone navigate the federal government hansard? I can't do it, can you? It's hidden in layers of governmentese, and stuffed into PDF form. What about the SA hansard? (actually, the SA hansard is better, it has search)
As far as I can tell:
For those of you who don't know; the media appears to be having a field day. Everyone who can is playing up to public fears and ignorance, as well as spreading misinformation about a recent event. Sandra Kanck, leader of the SA democrats, used her privilege to point out the stupidity of a law in state parliment. The law prohibits publication of suicide methods on the internet. She detailed methods one can use to kill themselves, in protest.
Since it's in the constitution (state?) that every going on in state parliment is put into the 'hansard', and that's now published on the internet, she very cleverly demonstrated the foolishness inherent.
It was about then the vultures came out to play.
The point of having people in state government is to have challenging and well thought out debate around issues. Kanck used her privilege to highlight an issue she feels is being ignored. Euthenasia. She's damned right too. Its a basic human right, and preventing the publication of information is against the notions of free speech, not to mention utter insanity.
To make law only target electronic media makes it even stupidier. Firstly because it's on every fucking myspace, livejournal, and look-im-16-and-tragic blog in existence, secondly because the law doesn't ban me from writing it into a letter, publishing in a book, or yelling it from the rooftops.
In the interest of challenging this law, I'd like to help those in need of death. - jukeb0x.com advises to be sure to use enough gun - suicide is not something you want to screw up.
suicidemethods.net recommends you buy the book (just so you know what it looks like to screw up), or look at the pictures, Dmoz has a category on it, Wikipedia has a section, Satanservice.org has a handy cheat sheet.
My favourite, by far, is How to Kill Yourself Like A Man. Eat a tub full of beans. Very tough. Very manly.
Do you think, if I'm a young individual, or elderly person, I'm going to go onto the internet, pull up google, and type in "kanck + hansard record + suicide"?
Don't flatter yourselves, state government vultures!
The bigger picture: The right to die is a basic human right. Giving a person the ability to go to a doctor and ask for their life to be ended should be legal. It should be entirely the doctor's obligation to ensure on all levels that someone is not merely depressed, but does infact want to die. It should be possible for someone to ease their own pain with an easy method, rather having to attempt to shoot themselves (and possibly fuck it up).
Can anyone navigate the federal government hansard? I can't do it, can you? It's hidden in layers of governmentese, and stuffed into PDF form. What about the SA hansard? (actually, the SA hansard is better, it has search)
As far as I can tell:
- No media outlets actually know what Kanck has said - or not provably so, because to be certain they have to have it in the hansard.
- It's not in the hansard, so the public can't check for themselves
- People who have a strong motivation to harm her public image are the biggest, and most vocal protesters about the 'foul act'.
- Dr John Brayley, the SA Director of Mental Health only has fear and superstition to back up his beliefs that 'internet publication leads to increases in suicide'; and barely half a wit to think that the hansard is the first place people look to off themselves.
- The media, who are decrying the act as shameful themselves, do so because they too think it will increase the amount of suicides. Only, the circus they have raised about the issue is far more likely to generate internet searches about suicide - there's so much of it. In decrying Kanck for being immoral, they have made themselves exactly what they accuse her of.
- People, in general, are stupid. Listeners to 891 ABC Adelaide would have heard an interview by Dave & Tony with Kanck about the issue. They kept ringing up to talk about the issue - only everybody got their panties in a twist and completely forgot what exactly it was Kanck had said. Hysteria ensued. Worse than that, the other person in the interview kept repeating baseless propaganda - and the callers kept attacking Kanck about what other people said as being misinformed.
Thursday, August 24, 2006
More TV guide ideas.
More ideas for my TV guide.
You need a few components.
You need a few components.
- A decent time/date/TV station parser. "Lost is on at 10 tommorrow night, channel 7" should be able to derive a timestamp, TV show and TV station.
- This adds to a google calendar or similar. Or an internal one.
- If it's internal, the calendar can be exported as iCal/Rss.
- UI for CRUD on TV stations - name, area of broadcast, related stations.
- Views for 'what's on channel X'
- The ability to say "i want to watch shows A, B, C" and turn those into a calendar, feed, whatever.
- A platform.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
How to use CVS from the Command Line in Windows
I was given CVS access to pear, and had been using TortoiseCVS for long enough to think I was comfortable with it.
Sadly, I wasn't. I was ALSO too embarrassed to ask for help. I mean, shouldn't the mystery of CVS be instantly obvious? TortoiseCVS just had me plain confused.
So; in 27 or less easy steps, here's the best way to use CVS. On Windows.
Sadly, I wasn't. I was ALSO too embarrassed to ask for help. I mean, shouldn't the mystery of CVS be instantly obvious? TortoiseCVS just had me plain confused.
So; in 27 or less easy steps, here's the best way to use CVS. On Windows.
- Download CVS. Try the latest stable version of CVS for windows.
- Unzip the archive, which just contains cvs.exe. Put it in your path, somewhere. For instance, c:\windows\ is an ideal place.
- Start Menu
- Run
- Type 'cmd'
- This is the command line. How scary. All Black and White and blinking at you.
- Type 'cvs'. If you've screwed up step #2, you'll get a file not found error. Go back and try again.
- The next thing we want to do is find a CVS server, and login to it. We'll try the PHP one. Type: cvs -d :pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net:/repository login - if you haven't figured it out, cvsread is your username, and cvs.php.net is the server. The pserver bit is just the method you intend to use to login with. phpfi is the password.
- Alrighty: time for our first checkout. Type: cd \, mkdir pear-cvs, cd pear-cvs, cvs -d :pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net:/repository checkout pear
Phing 2.2.0
The awesomeness that is Phing just reached 2.2.0. A
For those of you who aren't familar with Phing, it's a build tool for PHP, along the lines of Apache Ant. You give it a bunch of tasks to do (run unit tests, generate PHPDocumentation, create a pear package), and it runs them all at once. Very handy.
pear upgradewill sort out previous installations...
For those of you who aren't familar with Phing, it's a build tool for PHP, along the lines of Apache Ant. You give it a bunch of tasks to do (run unit tests, generate PHPDocumentation, create a pear package), and it runs them all at once. Very handy.
Monday, August 21, 2006
Sunday, August 20, 2006
Travelling To Kangaroo Island
I just tried googling for a way to get to kangaroo island by ferry. The travel industry appears to be as organised as a half cooked goose.
Sealink seems to be the most organised ferry service. It's $80, return, which isn't too bad, but I know it's going to cost an arm and a leg.
Sealink seems to be the most organised ferry service. It's $80, return, which isn't too bad, but I know it's going to cost an arm and a leg.
Saturday, August 19, 2006
Kingdom of Loathing
I want some KoL merchandise. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out Kingdom of Loathing for yourself.
Purely awesome!
Purely awesome!
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
TV Guide - Where is it?
Is it that impossible to want an easy, open, accurate TV guide for Australian TV? There are certainly online TV guides, like yahoo/seven, but that just doesn't cut it.
I want a TV guide in which I can subscribe to as RSS, and iCal. It should be free. I get the stupid TV weekly version of the guide coming to me, over and over and over.
Surely it's in the interest of the television stations to provide this kind of thing - the ABC gets it!
I want a TV guide in which I can subscribe to as RSS, and iCal. It should be free. I get the stupid TV weekly version of the guide coming to me, over and over and over.
Surely it's in the interest of the television stations to provide this kind of thing - the ABC gets it!
Friday, August 11, 2006
Monday, August 07, 2006
Sun's McNealy on Education
Forbes has an article on McNealy selling his don't-use-textbooks idea.
I think it's fucking awesome. It's just a nightmare to convince the same people who got stickers on textbooks.
I think it's fucking awesome. It's just a nightmare to convince the same people who got stickers on textbooks.
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
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