My new role at Elcom Technology

Some of you might be aware that Elcom's Technology Director and my friend Craig Bailey is leaving Elcom Technology - in fact his last day was last Friday. As our Technical Director he was inspiring, motivating and a great encourager - he let us know we had his confidence and trust, and backed that attitude up with his words and actions when under stress.

I will be stepping into Craig's shoes, and taking on the role of Technical Director for Elcom and helping guide our development, sysadmin and helpdesk teams. Whilst we have some similarities, I have more of a focus on Agile development and software craftsmanship (as Craig has mentioned). I will probably be taking a more hands-on approach to the role - simply because I have contributed to the dev work I will now be managing.

Craig and I have been discussing this role over the last month or so, and he got me interested in the hedgehog concept. That last link explains it pretty well, but basically it is all about helping you focus on what you could be best at in the world, how you can add (money) value and what you are most passionate about. The point where you will be most effective, rewarded and fulfilled, lies in the region where those three overlap.

After thinking about these, and discussing them with people that know me, my (current) take on these three is below:

I had followed a similar process many times in the past, but without the emphasis on coming up with a "simple, crystalline concept that flows from deep understanding about the intersection" of these three circles. Or as my Dad put it to me, something actionable and concrete.

Being Technical Director at Elcom offers me a chance to move closer to that intersection point, and I hope that in my first few months I can work on those things that might currently distract me from that focus in order to generate some very tangible results for myself and Elcom's owners.

I am a firm believer in servant leadership and am honoured that I have some of the best technical people it's been my pleasure to work with in our development, sysadmin and helpdesk teams. With great people in the team around you, it certainly makes my job easier, and more pleasurable. Like a good scrum master I am aiming to remove obstacles in the way of our technical teams and act as force multiplier for the whole team (the OODA Loop has some interesting parallels with the Agile principles).

It should be an interesting journey ahead!

Chrome updates offer a HUGE exploit window

I'm loving Google Chrome, the new browser offering from the Googleplex. However I was very worried this morning when I read that they have a proprietary (ie. not open-source) update infrastructure which downloads updates to the user's browser without telling them.

This is a major security flaw, and I'm frankly surprised by it - perhaps it is intended to be a short-term fix whilst the browser is in Beta, but many Google products (e.g. GMail) seem to never leave Beta. The real problem with the approach they've taken is their lack of transparency about security flaws and the fact they leave users in the dark:

"Users do not get a notification when they are updated ... When there are security fixes, it's crucial that we update our users as quickly as possible in order to keep them safe. Thus, it's important for us to not require user intervention."

That sounds very noble, but the problem is that it leaves users unable to reject an update as well. That means that if Google decides they want to change the browser to slap ads in your face every 30 seconds you can't stop it from doing that (you can always go back to another browser - assuming competitors still exist). More importantly it means that if some criminal did manage to take control (however briefly) of Google's update infrastructure then they could install whatever they like on your PC.

In fact any update infrastructure allows this to happen, and many are vulnerable to it. Google's not particularly different, and with the attitude they are displaying at the moment they are more likely to be exploited - because the people that could help them find problems are not being given full access to the software updates (the latest security changes do not show in the open-source changelog). Of course, not updating your software leaves you even more vulnerable.

A recent study into the update problem for browsers (found via ESJ) looked into the problem of users who do not update their browsers:

"We believe the auto-update mechanism as implemented within Firefox to be the most efficient patching mechanism of the Web browsers studied. Firefox's mechanism regularly polls an online authority to verify whether a new version of the Web browser is available and typically prompts the user to update if a new version exists. With a single click (assuming that the user has administrative rights on the host), the update is downloaded and installed. Just as importantly, Firefox also checks for many of the currently installed Firefox plug-ins if they are similarly up to date, and, if not, will prompt the user to update them. Opera's update mechanism is essentially the same procedure as a manual download and re-installation of the browser.

While Microsoft’s operating system auto-update functionality encompasses the Internet Explorer update mechanism even if the browser is not in use, the fact that patch updates (for both Internet Explorer 6 and 7) are typically only made available on a monthly basis means that updates are released less frequently (when compared to Firefox), which can result in a lower short term patching effectiveness.

Based upon our findings, we strongly recommend that software vendors embrace auto-update mechanisms within their products that are capable of identifying the availability of new patches and installing security updates as quickly and efficiently as possible - ideally enabled by default and causing minimal disruption to the user. We also recommend that these same auto-update mechanisms are capable of alerting the user of any plug-ins currently exposed through the Web browser that have newer and more secure versions available.

...

Given the state of the software industry and the growing threat of exploitable vulnerabilities within all applications (not just Web browsers), we believe that the establishment of a ”best before” date for all new software releases could prove an invaluable means to educating the user to patch or ”refresh” their software applications. The same ”best before” date information could also be leveraged by Internet businesses to help evaluate or mitigate the risk of customers who are using out of date software and are consequently at a higher risk of having been compromised."

It is worth noting that the researchers do not recommend a solution that involves automatic updating of the browser without user permission - rather they would prefer to let users know the "use by" date of their software in order to inform them that an update is required (see the paper for more details on how they suggest this could be done). Also their research paper notes that "Access to Google’s global Web server logs enabled the authors to provide the first in-depth global perspective on the state of insecurity for Web browser technologies," so it's not like some part of Google was unaware of the study.

Personally whilst I will continue using Chrome for some of my browsing I will be re-evaluating my continued use of it based on how Google responds to these sorts of security issues. I recommend you do the same.

bCisive gets the Minto Pyramid Principles

One of my favourite Australian software tools is bCisive by Melbourne company Austhink, led by Dr Tim Van Gelder.

They have recently announced that they have “entered into a Memorandum of Understanding to collaboratively produce a Minto software product based on the Minto Pyramid Principle^® and Austhink’s bCisive product”. This is great news as it joins the easiest argument mapping tool (I know, I've tried lots of them, including Standpedia, which looks like it died at the end of 2007) with one of the pioneers of informal argument mapping in the business world.

I first came across Barbara Minto years ago when my Dad loaned me her Pyramid Principle book. I lost that first copy, but replaced it and got my own as well. It really should be mandatory reading for anyone who ever has to write a proposal or training document.

Below is a screenshot of a product strategy bMap (bCisive argument map) I prepared for our TrainingManager.NET product:

The user interface does a great job of getting out of your way, but being accessible when you need it. The two orange buttons at the bottom of the window open panels that help you create and report on the bMap you have created. The zoom slider control makes it dead easy to change perspective and the graphical navigation tools are well thought out and consistent with programs that solve similar problems.

Having just gotten used to Office 2007 I find the user interface style of bCisive to make a lot of sense to me, and it is quite easy to use. This does for argument maps what PowerPoint did for slide preparation - it takes it from the domain of experts (or highly motivated amateurs) and puts it in the hands of everyday business users.

If you want to give it a try, bCisive allow you to use a trial version for 30 days.

More NEWS.com.au stuff-ups

NEWS.com.au is just full of interesting weirdness today, here are my two personal favourites.

From an article about Senator Obama winning the Democrat nomination:

"Excerpts of Senator Obama's speech were released prior to him taking the stage, but his first personal claim of victory came in a post he sent to his Twitter feed.  'IN St Paul, MN speaking after securing the nomination,' he tweeted."

I am sorry, but nobody seriously believes that the charismatic senator is responsible for writing his own twitter feed! There is some campaign flunky knocking these out as part of their media blitz duties.

At least they got their terminology right ... you tweet via Twitter.

The other I saw was a snippet advertising one of their video reports on a very serious issue:

'Doubling' and 'jumping by 50 per cent' are not the same thing. Perhaps someone with some maths sense should have checked that one for typos first? As it is I have no desire to wait for their ads to load before watching this story, so I'm still not sure how big the jump is, but it sure is worrying.

2008 has arrived!

Yes, I know that I'm a little late for a Happy New Year post, but actually this is another sort of 2008 I'm talking about:

• Windows 2008 Server
• SQL Server 2008
• CommunityManager.NET compiled under Visual Studio 2008 (targeting .NET 3.5 )

Elcom's Technical Director has just announced that http://www.elcom.com.au is now running using these three!

Coatesy gave us a kind word too.

Big props to Balaji (where's your blog man?) for putting in the hard work to make sure the CM code could compile and run under .NET 3.5. Craig mentions some of the other heroes that helped get this done, but Rajesh, Imad and Yul missed mentions there, so here's thanks to them too!

ASP.NET MVC is here

ScottGu has announced the CTP release of ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions. This is great news for ALT.NET and really has made my week. As regular readers might realise the key part of this release for me is the MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework for ASP.NET.

“ASP.NET MVC: This model view controller (MVC) framework for ASP.NET provides a structured model that enables a clear separation of concerns within web applications, and makes it easier to unit test your code and support a TDD workflow. It also helps provide more control over the URLs you publish in your applications, and more control over the HTML that is emitted from them.”

I think this finally gives ASP.NET developers some much needed flexibility. The guys at Microsoft are taking pains to point out this is not a replacement for the existing WebForms model, but they point to the following reasons to use the new framework:

• It allows developers to use the MVC pattern with ASP.NET more cleanly than ever before.
• It makes it easier to implement RESTful (Representational State Transfer) systems and to control your URLs using ASP.NET
• The MVC pattern allows for easier unit testing of business logic behind pages (now in controllers) and therefore helps promote the use of Test-Driven Development with ASP.NET.

I have some personal reasons for looking forward to this framework that may be too politically sensitive for the ASP.NET guys to admit to:

• This kills off the one form per page restriction, allowing for XHTML that more closely matches the functionality of the page.
• No more viewdata is a pain, but it also means that ASP.NET developers can now more easily incorporate other client-side frameworks into their applications (e.g. Yahoo! User Interface Library, Script.aculo.us, Prototype, etc)
• Ruby on Rails is looking a whole lot less attractive as ASP.NET MVC offers much of the same clarity of design whilst leveraging my existing ASP.NET skills.

I will probably devote a few more blog posts to exploring this interesting ASP.NET development, so feel free to let me know (via the comments) what you might be most interested in knowing about.

Elcom is hiring

My workplace (Elcom Technology) is looking to hire two junior .NET developers who are looking at working in a medium sized shop (35 staff overall, with 14 developers) and looking to get mentored and grown to become gurus in their own right.

The job ad is on Seek. Please feel free to apply or mention it to your friends.

This is one of the best places I've ever worked at, and there is a great bunch of experienced developers here you can learn from. This might be the start of your own personal walk on The Long Road:

To become truly good at programming is a life's work, an ongoing enterprise of learning and practicing.
Ron Jeffries

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 released!

Microsoft have given us developers an early Christmas present by releasing Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework v3.5 today! See Scott Guthrie's post about the release for full details.

The bits I'm waiting for the most are the VB.NET improvements, particularly Lambda Expressions which might give us the ability to use some of the niftier BDD test framework's features in VB rather than needing to write executable specs in C#. The new web designer interface and CSS/JavaScript improvements will be welcome ones too. Then there are other features that look nice, but I am less excited about, LINQ being foremost of those.

The piece I am most eagerly awaiting is not yet released, that is the ASP.NET MVC framework, which will give us .NET developers the same sort of simple and clean structure Ruby on Rails developers have been enjoying.

Emperor of global warming's new clothes

It seems that the mainstream media is finally catching up to what many bloggers have said for some time now, Al Gore's global warming crusade is fatally flawed due to factual errors and his own hypocrisy.

“The media are finally catching up with Al Gore. Criticism of his anti-global-warming franchise and his personal environmental record has gone beyond ankle-biting bloggers. It's now coming from the New York Times and the Nashville Tennessean, his hometown paper that put his birth, as a senator's son, on its front page back in 1948, and where a young Al Gore Jr. worked for five years as a journalist.”

There is also some interesting news about a new theory that explains the correlation between the sun's magnetic fields and climate change, especially the El Nino/La Nina tango in the Southern hemisphere.

“Dr Baker's model puts a more scientific and transparent theory to the concepts first developed by long-range weather forecasters Lennox Walker and Inigo Jones.

It also suggests there may be a longer 500-year solar cycle, which may help explain climate variability over the past centuries, including periods of unexplained climate variability such as the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.”

News.com.au loses the plot (again!)

I don't know what is going wrong with News.com.au, but someone certainly seems to be screwing up big time there. Here is the RSS news feed I saw on my morning scan of what's up:

Naturally my eye was drawn to the words in uppercase, "DON'T PUBLISH". Oops, this looks like someone got something into the RSS feed that should not have been there. When I clicked on the link, I expected to get one of their blank pages like I have before.

Imagine my surprise then when I see an entire article, with the same uppercase warning in its title:

Looking at the article in more detail it seems to have been posted at midnight tonight, a good 15 hours from now. The 'news' in question is the results of a survey News.com.au ran on their site, actually one I took part in myself. Releasing it early is just a silly mistake, but I would have thought their CMS would have made this really hard to do.

UPDATE: OK, this is getting silly, can you spot the typo in the first paragraph of this news story?



UPDATE 2: It seems that News.com.au has seen fit to release the story this morning, with a different headline ("Most Australians think they're fat" instead of "Body image story - DON'T PUBLISH"), and an updated byline ("By Lisa Bjorksten" instead of "By Jonathon Abbott"). Lisa writes for their Fashion blog, so she's probably the real author of the piece. I notice the old article is still up however ...

The End is Nigh! (of global warming alarmism)

Christopher Monckton is writing a series of articles for the UK's Daily Telegraph on climate change. His first rejects completely the Stern Report:

“Last week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming was the worst "market failure" ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government". This week and next, I'll reveal how politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science.

Sir Nicholas Stern's report on the economics of climate change, which was published last week, says that the debate is over. It isn't. There are more greenhouse gases in the air than there were, so the world should warm a bit, but that's as far as the "consensus" goes. After the recent hysteria, you may not find the truth easy to believe. So you can find all my references and detailed calculations here.

...

The large, full-colour "hockey-stick" was the key graph in the UN's 2001 report, and the only one to appear six times. The Canadian Government copied it to every household. Four years passed before a leading scientific journal would publish the truth about the graph. Did the UN or the Canadian government apologise? Of course not. The UN still uses the graph in its publications.


Even after the "hockey stick" graph was exposed, scientific papers apparently confirming its abolition of the medieval warm period appeared. The US Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate. They found that the graph was meretricious, and that known associates of the scientists who had compiled it had written many of the papers supporting its conclusion.”

As mentioned above, he backs his article with a comprehensive 40-page PDF document with calculations, references and discussions.

Climate Audit applauds this first article:

“The article is here and the background information (or at least the first part) is given here in pdf format. The backgrounder in particular is a pretty good overview of the current state of the science, such as it is, and covers the salient points from MM03, MM05GRL and MM05EE pretty well.

There are some slips of the keyboard in the backgrounder, so perhaps someone would like to e-mail Chris about them, or mention them in the comments.”

They also point out that it seems Mike Hulme, doesn't like the Stern report's alarmist language, which is strange seeing as his research centre contributed to it:

“To state that climate change will be "catastrophic" hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions which do not emerge from empirical or theoretical science.

Is any amount of climate change catastrophic? Catastrophic for whom, for where, and by when? What index is being used to measure the catastrophe?

The language of fear and terror operates as an ever-weakening vehicle for effective communication or inducement for behavioural change.”

From this blog on climate science research comes a set of interesting questions about climate science, followed by a pertinent dismissal of the UN's IPCC reports:

“These are important scientific questions which have either been poorly, or not at all, examined in climate assessments such as the IPCC and CCSP reports. Clearly, we need to move beyond such assessments that are written by individuals who are mostly evaluating their own research. Policymakers are poorly served by this inbred assessment framework by the scientific community.”

The more I read about this issue, the more it sounds like group-think taken to the extreme.

Words fail me ... but the VIC govt failed this little girl

Just venting a little over over at Cracked Jug.

Photos from Lebanon: Propaganda or Journalism?

During the War in Lebanon, we were given a nightly bombardment of shocking images of the toll taken on the Lebanese people. This continued during the day as the press ran with disturbing photos of the dead and dying, and the aftermath of war. Some small mention was made of the photoshopped smoke clouds that Reuters' bought from one of their contract photographers, Hajj.

But at the same time, alternative media outlets like Zombietime and Little Green Footballs have been unearthing some shocking irregularities in the War in Lebanon images that Reuters, AP and other newswire services have been shopping around. The LA Times picked up on this two weeks ago:

““”There's more, and it's worth your time to take a look. That's one of the undeniable strengths of the Internet and of the blogosphere, and the fact that it is being employed to help keep journalism honest ultimately is to everybody's benefit.

What the major news organizations ought to be doing is to make their own analysis of the images coming out of Lebanon and if, as seems more than likely, they find widespread malfeasance, some hard questions need to be asked about why it occurred. Some of it may stem from the urge every photographer feels to make a photo perfect. Some of it probably flows from a simple economic imperative — a freelancer who produces dramatic images gets picked up more and paid more. Moreover, the obscenely anti-Israeli tenor of most of the European and world press means there's an eager market for pictures of dead Lebanese babies.”

At least Andrew Bolt is making a fair bit of noise on his blog (and here) about the Australian press' silence on their being taken in by the Hezbollah ambulance hoax.

Reuters has addressed some of these issues on their blog, but by and large they have only concerned themselves with photos that are blatantly and undeniably false. Their corrections page mentions that Hajj was posting straight to the Global News desk and not via a photo editor - a practice they claim to have tightened up on, but that does not address the root cause of many of these issues - which is that Hezbollah is blatantly manipulating the media - and getting away with it!

Finally, some fun has been poked at those who have accepted the fake images:

Blogger gets a facelift!

Well, I may need to eat my words about Blogger's gluggy feature set, because there is a new version of Blogger in Beta (ahhh ... how Web 2.0 of them). Straight from the horse's mouth:

“Today we're launching a new version of Blogger in beta! You've been asking for ways to do more with your blog, and you can with this new release.”

If you want to see it in action, you simply need to go to http://beta.blogger.com/. Anyone can create a new blog on the beta service, although you will need a Google account to do so - also, the blogs are still hosted on blogspot.com, so you get the usual scarcity of good names.

Key differences include:

• Post labels (Google's name for tags)
• UI improvements, especially on the dashboard
• A move to "Layouts" instead of "Templates"
• Database driven pages, rather than static ones manually re-published*

* Whilst this is a great way of removing the horrid wait for something to publish on your blog, it does not help performance. I hope that Google have been looking to “design their on-demand systems for peak load, not average load” (as per Dave Stephens' suggestion).

Most of the new stuff is laid out in the new features tour, as well as screenshots and descriptions at the Google Operating System blog.

News.com.au gets Web 2.0

I was surfing the news websites at lunch today when I noticed that News.com.au appears to have caught the Web 2.0 bug. For an example news story that shows the new features of their website, check out the Carjacked cabbie's death 'unbelievable' story (Warning: this story deals wtih death and criminal activity).

The first thing I noticed was a Google maps mashup that showed the location of the events documented. This is a brilliant use of the web's graphical ability to add information to an online story that is missing from its print counterpart. This is especially important as the original story was sourced from AAP - which will also be selling it to News' competitors.

Zooming out on the map I worked out that the crime took place in a part of Melbourne that is close to the location of some of my family. This is something I would never have guessed from the suburb names alone and adds value to the story that I might not have received from other news websites (or their RSS feed).

The other nice feature that News have included, is a box at the bottom of the story to allow readers to submit the story to one of three major news and link collation sites. This helps boost their readership numbers, and adds potentially higher value to advertisers as it promotes the global 'reach' of the News.com.au brand.

The Fairfax guys running SMH.com.au are no slouches in the web design arena, but I suspect that the News Limited approach is also inspired by the boss's thoughts about the web:

“To find something comparable, you have to go back 500 years to the printing press, the birth of mass media – which, incidentally, is what really destroyed the old world of kings and aristocracies. Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it's the people who are taking control.”
Rupert Murdoch talking to Wired

EDIT: The News guys also have a nice 'Tools' feature on every page now, highlighting their commitment to both RSS feeds and getting user-generated content.

BBC Editors: The statistics of war

I found this a bit shocking, so take this as a warning that this post might give your heartburn ... Craig Oliver on the BBC's The Editors blog points out some disturbing statistics:

“• Around 30 to 40 people are killed every day in the current Israel/Lebanon conflict.

• About 100 people are killed every day in the violence in Iraq.

• And 1,200 people are killed every day in the war in the Congo.

All three of these stories are due to appear on tonight's Ten O'Clock News. They will probably run in that order - with the Middle East getting by far the most attention.

Does this say something about how we value human life? It's a fair question and one I worry about.”

Wow. That really makes you stop and think, doesn't it. After all, we worry about World War III breaking out because of the crisis in Lebanon, and look with horror on the images coming out of there and Iraq, but what the hell is happening in the Congo?! Where is our humanity?

I guess some of the problem comes down to the old Kirk/Spock dilemna ... in the original series of Star Trek, Captain Kirk would always conflict with his Science Officer, Spock, because he would invariably put the good of many people at risk in order to save the life of the few - based usually on the strength of the relationship he had with the few (usually Spock).

Spock would always lament such “illogical” behaviour, yet you always felt like you wanted to cheer Kirk on, and his choices seemed eminently reasonable. I think it is our tribal nature, our preference to favour the known over the unknown, that leads us this way. In that light, the conflict in Lebanon seems much more real because we are more familiar with its history (often from a biblical sense) than we are with the Congo. The media's bias in reporting is based on this, but it also serves to continue to feed this preference as it focuses on the conflict there to the preference of others.

Here is Craig Oliver's reasoning behind the order of stories:

“The Middle East needs more time and space for a variety of reasons:

• The sheer complexity of the situation requires space to help provide context and analysis.

• The current conflict plugs into so many other stories around the world, from what Tony Blair and George W. Bush call the "War on Terror", through to the price of oil, even the situation in Afghanistan.

• Many people fear the consequences of conflict in the Middle East more than anywhere else, and it is our job to help people understand a "scary world".

In short, our judgement is that Middle East is currently the biggest story in the world - by a wide margin - and it has the greatest implications for us all.”

Certainly the conflict in Lebanon repeats themes that are central to the War on Terror coverage - with terrorist attacks by Muslim militia, excessive retaliatory attacks by conventional military forces, the use of civilians as 'cover' and accusations of interference by foreign states by both sides. Yet the ongoing conflicts in Congo should not be ignored or put aside for that reason. Wikipedia has this to say about the conflict:

“For the next several years, even as the Second Congo War wound to an official end, a low level conflict continued in Ituri, with tens of thousands more killed. Half of the milita members are under the age of 18 and some are as young as eight. The continued conflict has been blamed both on the lack of any real authority in the region, which has become a patchwork of areas claimed by armed militias, and the competition among the various armed groups for control of natural resources in the area. In response, the United Nations directed its MONUC peacekeepers to carry out aggressive disarmament exercises against local milities.”

In some ways that is an even easier situation to resolve, yet we don't see Condoleeza Rice flying into the Democratic Republic of Congo for peace talks. There aren't regular newscasts from embedded reporters showing us what is going on, or how the global prices of gold will be affected by further conflict, or a sudden outbreak of peace ...

If conventional media want to find any unique role to play in this new wired world, then this is it - they can highlight conflicts and issues that may have little 'pull' on our tribal nature, but that are important and vital items to address and think about. Bloggers may (like I have) spend some small time talking about these issues, but unless someone goes there and helps make it real for the average punter by putting it front and center in the daily news, we won't get the sort of public awareness that moves governments to act resolutely to affect change*.

Without such action we lose our souls to self-absorbed, reality TV drivel, that plays screeching chords upon our most intense tribal reflexes, yet leaves critical issues in the real world untouched, unloved and ignored. I can imagine such a situation all too easily; as Agent K in Men in Black says:

“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.”

Conventional media is still one of the few ways you can really reach out to individual persons en masse (just ask advertisers), we must therefore ask that news editors take these things (i.e. like those statistics) that they may well know, and introduce them to us in our daily news, current affairs or even (gasp!) newspapers. They may not help us relax, or escape the daily grind, but they will help us appreciate what is really happening out there in the world beyond ourselves.

* Some people might point out that we have issues closer to home to worry about, and it is true we do have issues like youth suicide, indigenous health and water use - but they pale in comparison to 1,200 people dying per day.

Wallabies 49 vs Springboks 0

The ARU Match Report says it all:

“The Wallabies have annihilated the Springboks 49-0 at Suncorp Stadium on Saturday night, running in six tries and keeping the South Africans scoreless for only the second time in the two teams' history.”

Blog Style Changes

I've made some minor edits to the way my blog looks. For a start I will be making long posts look smaller by hiding most of the post on the main page and only showing it on the specific post page.

I'm also going to try to make sure I use the del.icio.us tags on all my posts. It was easy when I could use Firefox and Greasemonky, but I also need it to work in IE.

Finally, I've reduced the screen real estate dedicated to my Cafepress products, and made just one area that rotates randomly through them.

[EDIT: Yes, there is a problem with the main page's structure as the area between the main box and the sidebar is incorrectly filled with white. I'll fix this at some stage (or just refresh the whole template).]

Soccer Sucks, Bring on the Rugby!

I can't believe how Australia was sent out of World Cup 2006 by a lousy referee decision (it was a certainty that Italy could put the penalty away). At first I blamed Lucas Neill, then Grosso for his artistic 'dive', then the ref, then finally FIFA. Finally I realised who the real culprit was ... soccer itself is to blame. Check out the end of the Italy vs Australia match:

Italy vs Australia - World Cup 2006


Not only is the game far too slow (although Australia made even that interesting), but the scoring methods are far too hard, leading to low scorelines and games that are decided far too much by luck, and the ref's decisions, than by preparation, strategy, or actual play on the day.

Personally, I find rugby union to be a far more exciting game, with a greater degree of preparation and strategy required (which probably contributes to rugby's 'minnows' finding it so hard to compete).

Finally, compare the huge rugby (union and league) tackles in the video below with the pathetic play-acting of Grosso above.

Huge Rugby Tackles

Why so quiet?

Things have been quiet here in Falkayn-land. Mainly that's been because I started a new role around the middle of March, and between the hectic work to get finished where I was and the hectic work to get caught up where I am, plus some really hairy end-of-financial-year stuff at the new place, I've been busy.

I;ve also got less access to the internet than I did before, specifically to my GMail account, so a lot of my home time on the computer gets spent clearing my email.

Is Cattle Dog dead? Well, not quite, but in its current form, yes. The good news is that I will focus this blog more on Web 2.0 stuff, and restrict my private posts to my game/fun blog, Infini-nut.