The Blog of Lucien Stals

Since getting my new phone, my old one is in need of a little loving. So I’m offering it free to anyone who wants to come and pick it up from Swinburne, Hawthorn campus.

I don’t know the model, but it’s a basic thing with a small grayscale LCD screen and comes with a battery charger. I’ll upload a picture of it when I get home.

When I got my new phone, they threw in a new pre-paid SIM card as well, so you can have that with the phone as well (I’m still using my old SIM card). The SIM card probably comes with some credit on it, but I make no promisses.

So it’s a fully functional phone. You just need to activate the SIM card and charge the battery and you’ll be making calls.

If you are interested, reply here, or email me on nedlud at gmail dot com

Last week I bought myself a new phone, the Nokia 6234. My requirments were basic: the simplest phone I could buy with a camera in it (because I like to take pictures). The cheapest one that fit my criteria was a clamshell LG. I don’t like clamshell phones. And it was seriously cheap. The next two cheapest were Nokias. I settled for the more expensive of the two: the Nokia 6234. It looked nicer and seemed to have significantly better features.

I’ve been blown away with what it can do. I know it’s just a cheap ass low end phone, but it does everything I wanted it to and more. The address book and calendar functions do everything my PDA ever did and still manage to look better doing it. In fact I think this is what I wanted all along instead of a PDA.

It didn’t take long to get my (desktop Windows) computer talking to the phone via bluetooth, but I was frustrated that it wanted to sync only with Outlook (which I don’t use).

So I turned on the iBook. It found the phone easily enough and allowed me to start copying photos off the camera more easily than the Windows machine did, but I was unable to use iSync (unsuported device).

A quick google turned up the .mactomster site where purchsed an iSync plugin for 7 euros. (Nearly a quarter of the price of the other Nokia phone software for Mac, PhoneDirector).

Unfortunatley the site is in German and even after translating everything with Babel, I still managed to download the wrong plugin
I emailed the company and explained the problem, and two hours later they emailed me back the correct plugin. Wow. On a Sunday afternoon, and they were on the ball.

The plug in worked as advertised (the installation instructions come in English as well as German) and now my phone is happily using iSync with my Address Book on my iBook.

I am a very happy camper

I watched The Great Global Warming Swindle (Channel 4 web site for the show, and the Wikipedia page about it as well) last night on ABC.

Hosted by Lateline presenter Tony Jones featuring an in-depth interview with writer and director Martin Durkin, followed by an expert panel discussion with a studio audience.

I was pleased to see that ABC was willing to put to air a program that challenged the conventional wisdom. But I was very disappointed once the show finished and the “debate” about it began.

Read the rest of this entry »

The ACCC in Australia is suing Google for misleading conduct in it’s search results.

… the ACCC is alleging that Google, by failing to adequately distinguish sponsored links from “organic” search results, has engaged and continues to engage in misleading and deceptive conduct in breach of section 52 of the Act.

After ranting about SEO and sites which are all about money-before-content, I’m pleased to see this. I’m not going to get into a Google bashing contest, but I’m happy that a consumer watchdog is drawing a line and saying people need to distinguish between what is content and what is advertising. I’ve seen too many Sitepoint articles about how to trick users into clicking on ads by making them look like the content, and Sitepoint is a site I have (had?) some respect for.

Damn it!

We got broken into at work and they stole my laptop from a locked filing cabinet. It was a loan machine from work, but I’ll miss it.

Because it wasn’t mine to start with, I’d been careful not to store anything that I would miss on it, but browsers do such a damn good job of storing passwords and the like, that I just can’t afford to take a chance. So now I have to go through all my online accounts which I accessed from that machine to change the passwords.

What a way to start my Monday morning.

A cute article by Joe Bageant…

The monkey got so smart he took over everything, ate most of it, drove over the rest, then stuck the roadkill on his own dick as a nuclear warhead, and after having threatened what was left around him, set out to destroy even that small remaining scrap of his ruined earthly turf.

I just discovered bbPress.

It’s the forum version of Wordpress. I recall Clinton and I dicussion, way back in the early days of ByteClub/Tyler, how a forum and a blog weren’t much different from each other. It’s just posts. A blog is posts sorted by author and time of publication. A forum is posts sorted by topic and time of publication. Simple.

Looks like the Wordpress people figured this out as well and the result is bbPress.

Good things about it:
* it’s damn easy to use.
* it uses basiclly the same code as wordpress so it’s very easy to theme and extend.
* There is a “bozo” user type. Bozo’s, apparently, can log in and post like normal so they think everything is fine. But nobody will ever see their posts. Posts from bozo’s are hidden from all other users. Whoever came up with this one deserves a medal

Not so good things about it:
* there’s no permission system. Users can be authors or moderators (and some other levels), but you can’t prevent anyone from seeing all the posts. Even PhpBB, which I have no love for after the great Werewolf experiment of 2006, allows control over what groups of users can see what content. (could this be solved with a plugin?)
* Anyone can register for an account! Short of hacking, I see no way to keep any old potential spammer from registering themselves.

It hasn’t gone 1.0 yet. I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with it until them.