Fuel Watch bollocks

I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of this Fuel Watch debate the pollies are getting themselves in a lather over. Promised saving is 2 cents a litre? Bah!

We have a perfectly good cost-saving system now. It’s called “buy your petrol on tuesdays”, and the saving is as much as 10 cents a litre. Don’t mess with it, please.

Longer term, the price of petrol will go up. And up. Until it all runs out in 30 years time. By which time we’ll all be driving electric cars, or riding bikes, or in my case, zimmer frames. We need to get over this, ppl, and find alternative solutions, ASAP.

igal — nice tool for generating html image slide shows

After a wasted hour trying to make sense of Gimp — I just wanted to generate thumbnails from images — I eventually stumbled over a simple Linux command line tool called igal. Not only does this generate the thumbnails, it also resizes the originals to a manageable size, and generates the HTML pages to display the images as a slideshow. Neat.

This is why I love Linux. Think of a tool you need, and someone has probably created it.

Microsoft kills Live Search Books and Live Search Academic

Wired Campus: Microsoft Shuts Book-Digitizing Project – Chronicle.com

Microsoft said it was abandoning Live Search Academic and Live Search Books “to focus on verticals with high commercial intent, such as travel.”

I guess that means they’ve discovered there’s no money in making books and research available to ppl. Either that, or they’re unable to compete against Google Books and Google Scholar.

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Tags: search, academic, books, ebooks

Your call is important to us …

End of line for British red phone boxes | The Australian

Apparently BT are calling time on the red phone box in Britain. The interesting part of the story is that (a) this is due to the ubiquity of mobile phones; and (b) the MP for Cornwall saying that mobile coverage in some areas is crap, and therefore they still need phone boxes.

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Is Keven Rudd a stupid jerk?

Why oh why, with the controversy over the censorship of the Bill Henson photographic exhibition, did Kevin Bloody Rudd feel it necessary to label the work as “revolting”, and pontificate about “letting children be children”. Had he seen the photographs in question? I very much doubt it. Two images were published in today’s Australian, and they certainly look neither pornographic nor revolting to me.

So one is forced to the conclusion that Kevin’s is a knee-jerk reaction, and that he’s simply playing populist politics. And given that this is now (regrettably) a matter for the courts, it is very inappropriate, and unstatesman-like, for Rudd to be pronouncing judgment.

If he continues in this vein, my guess is that the voters will be sick of him before the next election. Maybe Julia will get her chance sooner than people expect. (Go Julia!)

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Tags: politics, pornography, censorship

Photo style

Looking back over my Flickr stream of the past month, it may be difficult for someone else to discern a pattern, or to know what “my style” is. (Or it may be obvious — I have no idea what other people think!)

Clearly I like colour and texture, as demonstrated by this image of an old stone wall covered in graffiti:

And I like the abstracts, caused by randomness or chance, to be found in urban and natural environments: and
But I also like strong graphic lines, as here:

or here:

So, I suppose I don’t have just one particular “style”, but several. And that’s surely a good thing.

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Tags: art, photography, flickr

Speech writer for Melbourne Uni VC?

I am somewhat perplexed by this job for a speech writer for the Vice Chancellor of Melbourne Uni., at a salary of around $65k.

The advert for this states:

The Speech Writer will help to articulate the vision and ideas of a Vice-Chancellor with a broad range of interests and a busy speaking schedule. The Speechwriter must be able to distil the essence of an idea and create a powerful message in speeches and written documents.

Now, it seems to me that someone at VC level (on a salary of $500k (or more, maybe much more) should be expected to articulate their own vision, and create their own powerful messages. Otherwise, why were they appointed?

I guess senior politicians these days routinely use speech writers, but this has always seemed somehow improper to me. If you voted for a particular individual, then it ought surely to be that individual’s words and ideas that you get, rather than those of some low-paid flunky.

Same with Vice Chancellors, I think.

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Flock vs. Gnome, fixed

I finally figured out how to get the Gnome desktop (actually, Nautilus, I guess) to use Flock as the default browser for opening html files. [Yeah, probably boringly trivial to those who know, but ... I had to figure it out, so maybe someone else does too.]

When I installed Flock, I did so as per “instructions” for Linux users: unpack the tarball into your home home directory. OK. Yeah, that works. Except, when telling Nautilus to use Flock to open HTML files (“Open with other application”/”Use custom command”), it produced a null response.

However,trying to run flock from the command line revealed that it was not locating a needed library file. Even though that file was in the Flock  directory. So … poking around in the flock start script (“flock”), I found a reference to /usr/local/lib/flock-1.1.4. Ah-ha! So, experimentally, I reinstalled flock in that location, and tried running it from there, and it worked. So, there you have it ppl. Install Flock in that location (needs sudo) and you’ll be happy.

[And they could have said that in the install notes. Grr.]

Death-threat spam

Woo! I’ve got one! There’s currently a new spam email scam going around, which tells the recipient they are going to be killed (!) unless they pay $8000. Here’s the full text:

I felt very sorry and bad for you, that your life is going to end like this if you don’t comply. I was paid to eliminate you and I have to do it within 10 days.

Someone you call your friend wants you dead by all means, and the person have spent a lot of money on this, the person also came to us and told us that he wants you dead and he provided us your names, photograph and other necessary information we needed about you. If you are in doubt with this I will send you your name and where you are residing in my next mail.

Meanwhile, I have sent my boys to track you down and they have carried out the necessary investigation needed for the operation, but I ordered them to stop for a while and not to strike immediately because I just felt something good and sympathetic about

Now do you want to LIVE OR DIE? It is up to you. Get back to me now if you are ready to enter deal with me, I mean life trade, who knows, and I might just spear your life, $8,000 is all you need to spend. You will first of all pay $3,500 then I will send the tape of the person that want you dead to you and when the tape gets to you, you will pay the remaining $4,500. If you are not ready for my help, then I will have no choice but to carry on the assignment after all I have already being paid before now.

Warning: do not think of contacting the police or even tell anyone because I will extend it to any member of your family since you are aware that somebody want you dead, and the person knows some members of your family as well.

For your own good I will advise you not to go out on.

So, there you have it. I wonder if they’ll take Visa?

Joking aside, this is pure evil. While I can happily laugh this off as another pathetic (and badly written) attempt to separate me from my money, I can imagine there being many people who would completely freak out if they received one of these. So, if you have any friends who might receive and be affected by one of these, please be sure to tell them its a hoax.

Ripping Youtube on Linux for fun and … fun

Today I learned how to rip … er, download, videos from Youtube for using offline, and how to extract the audio from music vids. Couldn’t be easier.

1. Getting the video.

This is easy, using the youtube-dl application, which can installed with

    sudo apt-get install youtube-dl

Then just run

    youtube-dl -t <URL>

where the -t option uses the video title as a file name.

The file saved is type flv — flash video — which can be played natively using Movie Player or similar.

2. Extracting the music.

If you just want the audio from the file, use ffmpeg as follows:

    ffmpeg -i yourfile.flv yourfile.mp3

Could not be simpler.

Is there no end to the crunchy, vitamin-enriched goodness of Linux? I think not.

Disclaimer: all of this is potentially illegal; the information provided here is for research purposes only.

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Tags: linux, ubuntu, flash video, flv, youtube