Category Archives: Regional

Region-specific concerns, politics, issues

The joys of the international money market

I use gandi.net for a lot of my domain registration. They allow payment in your choice of US Dollars ($15 per year), Euro (12) or UK pounds (8.30). So when today I had to renew a domain, I checked what the cheapest option in Australian dollars.

US $15 = A$17.38
EU €12 = A$20.05
UK £8.30 = A$19.38

So no contest, USD is the way to go. Thanks for providing the option, Gandi!

(Yeah I could switch to a cheaper registrar. But I don’t have the time or energy to do so at the moment, thanks for asking.)

Another day, another broken form

FormThis time it’s the BBC’s Children In Need appeal. Okay, so CIN isn’t meant to be seen outside the UK, but what with Channel BT and YouTube, it should be no surprise that bits of it (such as the superb Doctor Who short) have been seen around the world.

And I decided I wanted to donate. ‘Cos it’s a good cause and the dollar’s going well against the UKP.

A quick Google and I figured out what they were talking about when they asked about Gift Aid. Something for UK taxpayers only, alas.

But the billing address caught me out. Okay, let’s put my state name in the County field. That should work. Country… well they only seem to have continents, not countries. Australasia is it I guess. Dunno what the credit card company will make of that.

Submit… ah, it seems to be doing something. Uh oh, it rejected the postcode. Wrong length. Uh no, my four digit postcode is all I have. Tell you what, I’ll stuff it with zeroes. 0000003204. That would crack Aussie Post up, I’m sure.

Resubmit and… oh. It thinks it’s already running. “Your request is being processed….. Please be patient….”

Well I am normally, but at time of writing it’s been giving me this error for 20 minutes.

Has it gone in? Maybe, maybe not. I’ll check my credit card transactions in a day or two, and hope the Children In Need don’t need my donation that much.

(Oh what the hell, you might as well enjoy it here too.)

Statistics shows Rudd has created more jobs than Work Choices

In a demonstration of how difficult it is to single out a root cause the changes in a figure derived from complex behaviour, an economist (using the exact methodology that John Howard cites for determining the contribution of Work Choices to labour market growth) has shown that:

… [Kevin] Rudd has added many jobs – in fact 10% more jobs per month than Work Choices did.

So: politician lies; footage at eleven. If the government wanted to actually measure if Work Choices made things better, they should have said something like “everywhere except WA”, or “only applies to people born after the 6th of the month” or whatever. Then they’re would be two systems, and you could actually measure it.

Myself, I’m looking forward to the decrease in employment because Rudd is no longer leader of the opposition (read the article, you’ll understand that comment eventually).

ANZ computerised banking is user-hostile

I have an ANZ Bank account. Using their website to pay bills is an exercise in frustration. I only have one account, but the website insists on me picking it out of a dropdown with two entries – the first one, the default, instructing me to pick an account. Failure to do so results in an error – “Please choose a From Account.” I only have ONE! Assume that’s where I want to pay from! Then one must pick who to pay, with an option to pick previous billers from a drop-down list. If you pick from the dropdown without JavaScript enabled, you get the error “Please select a biller from the drop-down list or enter a biller code.” – with JavaScript it fills in a few fields for you, but why does it even need you to fill those fields in if you’ve picked your biller already? Fill them in when I click the “I’m done” button!

Finally, we come to a bugbear I have with ANZ currency fields. You can’t enter a dollar amount, it has to include a decimal point with two following cents; they can’t infer from a lack of a decimal point you’re talking about a dollar amount. They enforce this rule on their website, and they insist that at an ATM you enter the number of cents you wish to withdraw from the ATM. Given the smallest unit of currency available from an ATM is $20, what is wrong with this picture?

2Clix backs down… maybe

There’s uncertainty about whether or not 2Clix has dropped its action against Whirlpool. While the Sydney Morning Herald reported it earlier today, Whirlpool commented that they haven’t had any official notification.

Meanwhile ITNews.com.au quotes 2Clix MD David Morgan as saying that the case had been dropped and Turnbull and Co had been notified.

But Whirlpool’s legal people haven’t yet seen the notice of discontinuance, and have been unable to contact 2Clix’s legal people, and have therefore concluded that until they see it formally in writing, and it’s still in the court records, it’s not over. Indeed, there’s speculation from sources close to Whirlpool that it might just be a ploy to make them let down their guard.

Watching with interest.

No more Melbourne swapmeets

SwapmeetAlas, hardware geeks in Melbourne, swapmeets are no more. The associated Computer Trader magazine has also gone west, along with its web site, which briefly said:

Max and Dorothea have been receiving a significant amount of harassment by lawyers acting in relation to the sale of counterfeit goods at the swapmeets and by Computer Trader. They have found the allegations and threats of legal action against them to be very stressful and detrimental to their health and general well being. The allegations are untrue and the threats are without foundation.

Max and Dorothea have always been at pains to operate their businesses within the law and with integrity and transparency. They thank their staff and customers for their support over the past sixteen years.

(The site itself is gone already, but is currently available in the Google cache.)

With heightened competition from online retailers and aggregator sites like StaticIce, it’s not hard to see how this kind of game might not be as profitable as it once was. Even obscure/old equipment that once might have been found at swapmeets is probably more easily found on eBay these days. Legal issues aside, maybe it’s time was over.

(Thanks to MGM for the tipoff.)

2Clix sues Whirlpool for forum posts

Software company 2Clix has decided to sue Whirlpool (an Australian online news, forum and community site), for “false and malicious” forum posts about 2Clix’s software products.

Essentially it appears Whirlpool’s users have been critical of 2Clix in various threads, with such gems as:

As a user of 2Clix for over 2 years, and the primary IT support person for my company – I would advise you to AVOID this program at all costs.
and
We installed 2clix and ended up throwing it out two weeks after going live. This company has many problems and I would strongly recommend that any potential users look else where.

While 2Clix had a go at defending themselves on the forum, it seems they’ve also decided to sue the forum’s owners. Maybe they got angry that one of the threads is the top hit in Google. If the case gets anywhere, it could obviously have repercussions for other online communities, so it’ll be interesting to see where it goes.

Update Thursday: This story has hit the MSM.
The Age: Firm sues forum to silence critics
ZDNet: 2Clix scores own goal with Whirlpool case
Computerworld: 2Clix sues broadband forum for “false and malicious” threads
…and and more

Update Wed 2007-09-19: Media reports that 2Clix drops the lawsuit, but it’s not official yet.

Real Estate Websites Suck: Part 2

Everytime, every single time I’ve tried to use Real Estate Websites for real-world stuff they come up short.

Searching, the basic function of the Real Estate Website, just doesn’t work.

I want to buy a house in a suburb. Not a unit, not a duplex, not an apartment.

So I search for houses, and blocks of land. And included in the result set is a semi-detached home. How the hell am I meant to bulldoze one of those? Is this ability to call a semi-detached house a free-standing house unique to only one website?

One site, Domain, doesn’t let you specify that you don’t want semis, so, of a fashion they can be excused. Except they’re missing a feature the other sites give you. So, Domain sucks.

The other two sites, RealEstateView and RealEstate.com.au both suck because they include properties I specifically told them to exclude. “Oh,” I hear you say, “it’s not their fault. The agent put in dud data.” This would be an excuse if the listing fees were a few bucks. But for hundreds of dollars, they can afford to have someone on minimum wage spend a few minutes sanity checking each listing, or they can have text matching algorithms running over the listing looking for words like “detached” and flagging that entry for review because “house” listings ought not include the word “detached”. For example. Or, heaven forbid, allow the users of the site to report misleading listings for subsequent correction. That would be nice. No more million dollar homes turning up in my sub-$600K search.

Part 1 of this (rather long) series of rants was sent to all three websites. None responded, other than with auto-responders. They all suck so much!

Satellite pictures: shop around

Even before the controversy over them blurring their Sydney images, it was noted that local map/sat pic providers are doing a better job than Google Maps: Ivan Pope says for the UK, try 192.com, and I’ve found Whereis.com.au has some better pics than Google for some Australian cities outside Sydney (to the point where you can see individually parked cars… hey where’s my car, it’s not at home? Ah there it is…)

Mind you, it looks like for rural and regional areas, Google’s still better, and they’re probably pouring more money than most into updating their pictures (they recently updated Melbourne, and a number of other cities). The bottom line seems to be: shop around.

Top games

Edge 100 best video games For Aussies wanting to grab a copy, Edge’s 100 Best videogames of all time (air freight) has landed in newsagents (well, a few of the better ones), though all but one copy had been snapped up by the time I visited MagNation today at lunchtime, so you’ll have to be quick. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait a couple of months for the sea freight edition to arrive.

The release of the list of games made the news worldwide, with Legend of Zelda: Ocarina being awarded the top gong.

Meanwhile, GameTunnel has named the top 100 indie games of the last three years.

MODM, NAS, APC and other acronyms

I’m sorry Cam. I was intending to go to tonight’s MODM (Melbourne’s Online Digital Media) event at Fed Square, but after a bugger of a day at work (that started before I even left the house, and got steadily more frenetic) frankly, on a cold night like this, I just wanted to get home to my warm house and a bowl of soup. Hope it went well though.

In my spare moments today, I’d been eyeing off today’s Zazz offer — a basic desktop machine for A$453 (inc shipping). Basic it may be, but it’s actually got more grunt than my secondary desktop machine, which is getting old and is far from dazzling in its speed, and sometimes frustrating compared to the faster PC. (Also its USB ports don’t work, and I haven’t got the energy/expertise to figure out why.)

I was finding that tempting enough, then I found myself reading this month’s APC on the train home, an article about setting up a NAS on an old PC. Ooh. Now there’s an idea. Glenn isn’t the only Geekranter who’s been looking at options for this — it’s been something I’ve been thinking about for some time now. (I did try leaving files on the MG35, but it’s not ideal, and it’s very slow via Ethernet.)

So I’ve ordered the Zazz deal for a new secondary desktop, and while I wait for that, I’ll try and figure out how to swap the Windows XP licence off the old PC and onto the new one (and Ubuntu onto the old, to run the NAS as per APC’s suggestion — though NAS-specific OSs such as FreeNAS also look like a good option).