Category: Computing

Celebrity confusion

It was very funny flicking past Oprah the other day long enough to watch her being utterly confused by the concepts of how the internet worked.

The guy who was explaining, who was using really basic terminology and analogies to explain the system, would explain how routers and network switches and DNS servers worked and Oprah’s brow just furrowed deeper and deeper. She seemed to kind of think that it all just went through the air, and had no idea how things (emails for example) found their way from their starting point to their intended destination.

Very funny to watch. Also very scarey when you consider that Oprah is apparently a pretty intelligent individual. Obviously not that tech savvy though..

Sticking it to China

Being someone who hasn’t let the fact that china has the world’s fastest growing economy distract me from the fact that it also has one of the most repressive systems of goverment*, I am mighty pleased to see this article in slashdot, which talks about a new piece of software which passes encrpyted packets to allow people in china (and other countries that monitor internet activity of individuals who want to read about such subversive ideas as “freedom” and “democracy”) to read pages that would otherwise be blocked by government firewalls, and to read them in a way that is theoretically undetectable.

Here’s hoping it works, and that it inspires others to release other pieces of subversive software to encourage freedom of information.

*which of course sets me apart from numerous other people, companies, organisations and governments who seem happy to turn a blind eye if there is a profit or advantage in it for them (microsoft, google, US government, we’re looking at you…).

The feline F1 skill

Since getting Jack I have been reminded of cats’ uncanny ability to always step on the F1 key whenever they walk across my laptop’s keyboard.

Jack mainly does the walking across the keys simply as a way of getting my attention, but still he almost always hits F1 and causes the help screen to come up for whatever program I am currently using.

What would be funny would be if I could re-program the computer the launch a little window with jack’s picture in it and caption that says “Pay attention to me!!!!” instead.

Death of a Dodo

Well, I’ve finally sorted myself out, and set up a proper permanent web host.

We can now be found at www.ramsayfamily.org .

I won’t be adding anything new onto this Dodo site, so wander on over to the new site and see what goodies are up over there.

The Gmail Phenomenon

Everyone seems to be getting Gmail addresses at the moment. Just like a few years ago when everyone seemed to have a hotmail address, now everyone seems to be switching to Google. It’s rather funny watching the flowing tides of internet trendiness.

Sans elektronique

Due to a series of mishaps I am without several of the electronic gizmos which would usually be referred to as “inseparable” from me, and it’s a mighty odd sensation.

Firstly my microphone on my phone has been playing up, meaning that I can hear people talking to me, while they can only hear a buzzing on the other end, so off it went to get fixed (under warranty luckily (and less that a week left on the warranty too – Score)).

Then I had a rather embarrasing episode where I tripped while undressing and stood on my PDA, cracking the screen, which also meant that it needed dispatching to the repair centre (although no warranty this time – D’oh).

All in all it has left me very disconnected from the electronic world, and with unnervingly light and empty pockets.

Music industry incompetence

Now with the acquisition of our previously mentioned non-proxied internet conection I found myself in the position of once again being able to download music. Recently however my conscience (pushy little so and so that it is) has been troubling me on the downloading music front, and so I decided to try doing things the legal way. First I installed iTunes, only to be informed that the iTunes store was unavailable in my country (a fact that apple had prominently failed to mention anywhere on their website). Since that was the only music provider that I specifically knew anything about I went to the ARIA website.
Now my rational here was that seeing as the ARIA people were supposed to be the main advocacy group for Ausalian music artists, and were so opposed to illegal downloads, I reasoned that they would be doing everything in their power to promote existing legal alternatives, and as such would have links to online music stores operating within Australia.
How wrong I was – not that I can admit to being overly surprised. After all, it took them something like 5 years to realise that music downloading was something that they weren’t going to be able to stamp out, and was in fact something they were going to be able to make money out of. What I found was that the ARIA site contained not a single mention of how you could download music legally, or even any propoganda espousing the relative virtues of “doing the right thing”, so to speak.
As an industry advocacy group I can only conclude that ARIA are doing a singularly shithouse job of actually advocating anything, and having eventually found some music stores (off my own bat), I was left with the conclusion that even after all this time the music industry still has no concept of what the consumer actually wants, and that if they don’t provide a product that in some way atg least vaguely resembles what the consumer wants, they have next to no chance of ever attracting people away from the existing illegal alternative.