We've just arrived in Coffs Harbour after an early start. We're heading up the coast to Uki for a New Year do. We being Don, Christine, Eric, Holly and I. Rachel, Mikey, Leonie, Mark, Lee and Nick are in cars behind us.Perl is indeed like slitting the throat of a live chicken and smearing its blood and entrails on an effigy of your enemy.
So Rudd has announced that we're going to reduce our greenhouse emissions by a staggering five percent. How ambitious! Worse, every polluting industry and his lobbyist appear to be in line to get a handout, giving them no incentive to reduce emissions. All the while the industries that aren't carbon-intensive don't get a handout!
Note that Australia's Kyoto target was for an 8% increase in emissions on 1990 levels by 2012. We're unlikely to even make this target, despite the fact that we managed to get the "Australia clause" into the treaty, which allows us to include the extraordinary land clearing in our 1990 baseline levels.
This new soft commitment is, instead, from a baseline of our 2000 emission levels, so you can't even compare it to our Kyoto commitment, and I suppose, means we'll still be emitting more than we did in 1990 by the time we hit 2020!
What's the point? So much noise, so little impact.
Last night Holly, Todd, Pete and I went to see Canadian band Holy Fuck at The Annandale. Quite an incredible gig. For many many years, bands have been trying to do electronic music completely live, and have almost all completely failed. Some ambient bands manage to get away with it, because if you put enough delay on anything it'll sound alright if the tempo is low. This was the first time I've seen fully-live banging techno work. Brilliant!
One of the good things about working in the CBD is the Asian food. At the bottom of World Square, where I work, is an Asian supermarket. I'm enjoying finding all the weird and wacky snacks.
Today's discovery was pea flavoured Pretz. Quite a hit with the office they were, too! They're kinda pretzel textured long sticks of salty, pea-flavoured goodness. Yummy!
There were also some other wacky flavours like "roast" and "salad". Even better, it seems there's also Beer Pretz which sounds brilliant!
It seems there's a lot of people who think that images in Wikipedia can be used however they like. In fact, unless they've been released into the public domain, they have licenses that require some fairly minor, but still important, actions if you want to use them.
Below is an email I've just sent to the owner of Sydney Architecture Images: Newtown Gallery, who seems to have taken all the photos from the Wikipedia article on Newtown, without any attribution, and slapped some ads on it. I'm willing to give the person the benefit of the doubt.
Your Newtown Gallery is breaching the copyright of, it seems, all the
images from Wikipedia's Newtown article:
http://www.sydneyarchitecture.com/INW/MAIN-GAL-NEWTOWN.htm
Specifically, and what made me notice, is that you are using my photo:
Images on Wikipedia are not free for you to use without restriction, unless specifically released into the public domain (for example, the Trocadero image you've used). Most of the images on Wikipedia are available under quite liberal licenses, but they do impose some requirements on you.
In the case of my photo, I have licensed it under the GNU Free Documentation License. This license has quite simple requirements, basically that you must attribute the author and license your copy of the work under the same license.
This image that you're using:
So in summary, you are free to use these images, but only when you follow the requirements of the license. Please amend your site accordingly.
If people want to send their kids to a school that is a social, single-gender and/or religious ghetto in an attempt for them to meet the "right" people, keep away from the "wrong" people, live out the dreams of their parents or continue some unbroken line of inherited bigotry, they should pay for it themselves.
From this opinion piece. Couldn't agree more.
Put a different way, as my public school teaching uncle said it, you don't get a rebate from the government for not using the public swimming pool when you install one in your backyard.
I remember seeing these signs all over Leicester, and just thought to look it up. Shonki Brothers real estate. How appropriate.
For the non-Australians, the word shonky means shoddy, dubious quality. For example, the Australian Consumers' Association has the annual Shonky Awards.
Wow Lindsay, that was bloody quick! Yesterday I asked about doing a geo mashup of the NSW government's name and shame list of dodgy food joints, and today Lindsay has done one. Impressive!
Now I wanna know how you did it, and how you managed it so fast!
A site screaming out for a geo-mashup is the NSW Food Authority's Penalty Notices list, which shows the companies that have received penalty notices for poor hygiene and the like. Problem is, the data isn't in a very human-usable form, but would be very amenable to a mashup and map overlay!
I think it's time for Australia to get something like PlanningAlerts.com, which does this for local authority (council) planning lists. So, for example, it could fetch the list of development applications for my local council, and overlay them on a map. More importantly, you could register with the site and have it email you if there's a DA near your house.
The code for PlanningAlerts.com is open, but it's kinda UK-centric. Any ideas where to start doing mashups in Australia?