Version 2.3.6.4.27.5 - With over 1,000 new features!

You probably haven't noticed but Firefox 5 was released this week, exactly 3 months after Firefox 4 was released. Now you may be thinking, big deal? Isn't this a good thing? How does this even make a blog-worthy topic? Let me give you one more point before I race into my discussion: Firefox 3 was released in June of 2008, 3 years before Firefox 4 and Firefox 2 was released 2 years prior to that in 2006.

So what? they've sped up the release dates of Firefox? Surely this is a good thing! You get new features, bug fixes and a new number! But to me I think, why didn't they just release these awesome "1000 new improvements" that came with Firefox 5 (You can read the press release here) with the previous version only 3 months ago? Sure they may take a bit of time to implement but surely they could have delayed the launch of 4 by a month and implement a majority of these "improvements" then, or even release a small patch later on to implement them but not a whole new version number! It seems to me that companies are almost purposefully releasing new applications with missing functions so that they can generate new hype for this program only 3 months later with a new model number or service pack. Look at Windows Phone 7, the move from 6 to 7 left out a lot of useful features that were already implemented in 6 (copy and paste, actively syncing etc.) and now they're being put right back in with mango, why? Is it that hard to put these features in the operating system to begin with?
Microsoft aren't the only ones that do this, apple are particularly bad. Copy and paste took 2 major operating system updates before it was implemented, over the air syncing is still to be released and multi-tasking wasn't until iOS4!
Google chrome has now moved to a new 6 week update cycle, and Firefox now do nightly builds for those keen beans...

What really frustrates me is apps on apple's app store, it seems that now people are so used to patches that developers just want to push out their app as fast as possible and deal with all the pesky bugs afterwards. Some apps are slow, buggy and regularly crash and it then takes the developer two months to realise and fix these annoying bugs. Apple themselves aren't innocent of this either, a couple of months ago xCode 4.0 was released, with a whole array of cool new features, however you go and read the reviews on their app store and you get comments like this:

"I've already downloaded the software at 4.5Gb, and I updated it when there were some minor bug fixes by downloading another 4.5Gb. Now there is ANOTHER update that is 4.5Gb!"

"Slow, buggy, UI unresponsive when compiling"

"Disappointed to find that the simulator crashes every time you open it, would have helped if Apple could deliver a stable developer platform."

And there are plenty more. This is just one example of how quick release times can back-fire: developers start pushing out applications that are buggy and not fully tested because they need to beat the competition to it, or they want to be on the "cutting edge of technology."

So with updates coming thick and fast is being on the cutting edge of technology a good thing for us users or are we being constantly plagued with temperamental applications or useful features being left out so that the next release has something to shout about?

To be honest, I love Google's new release cycle, mainly because they only push small updates and are never buggy, I really only wrote this to have a rant at Apple about xCode and iOS updates and Microsoft about mango, oh and those annoying app developers that make me update their application every morning...

Petey

Photo Blog

Now I'm not one for silly iPhone camera apps that do some stupid old camera noise as you take a photo or something but the other day I did stumble across an app that a friend was using to take photos, and I fell in love.
Since then I've been taking about a photo a day to document and tell my facebook/twitter friends what I have been up to, today I will share this joy with you (if you even care that is!)

I will continue to post some of these photos on facebook and twitter (Here's my twitter profile if you want to follow me) but if you have neither of those (or aren't my facebook friend) then I have set up a little photo blog so that each time I take a photo it will update the blog and then you can see and follow along with my crazy adventures (that aren't really that crazy).

You can check the blog out here: http://peteysphoneblog.blogspot.com/

If you don't care very much for photos/whatever I normally do (which wouldn't be surprising) then just completely ignore this post and hopefully I'll get around to writing a real post about something actually interesting.

Petey

Privacy

So university is officially back in session, this is bad news for me but good news for you because it means I need to do more procrastinating than during the holidays which in turn requires me to write more blog posts. Going on holiday is always frustrating from a news point of view because unfortunately the world doesn't go on holiday as well, so you have to catch up on hundreds of news stories that you missed while you were away, I'm still trying to catch up while I write this so I thought I'd instead of recapping what I've missed while I've been away I'd look at a much more recent issue hitting headlines.

You may have heard about a small problem Playstation has been having for last couple of days, unfortunately for them they decided to enrage some linux nerds (which is ALWAYS a bad idea) and consequently the linux nerds decided to hack into Playstations online network and steal their PSN (Playstation Network) database, the what? I hear you say... lets just say these nerds now have the following data about all Playstation users:

Their...

Name

Address (city, state, zip)

Country

Email address

Birthdate

PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login and handle/PSN online ID.

Oh and potentially all their credit card details....

One must also remember that most people aren't very password savvy, so it is highly likely that the password they use for their PSN account is the same as their password for many other things.
Playstation did politely send an email out to all their customers 9 days after the intrusion warning them and you can read it here.

Now this isn't the only time that people's private information has been compromised this year, you may remember that just 3 months ago Vodafone Australia had an "unbelievable" lapse in security and published millions of customer's private information on the web for all to see.

And just the other day apple was in some hot water when some researchers discovered a little file stored on every iPhone that has been recording every place the iPhone has been since June (You can read that article here), however this information isn't public until you get a hold of that file, and apple did announce today that it was a "bug" and would be fixing it and releasing a patch very shortly.

Finally, Google last year had a bit of an issue when it was discovered that they were collecting data from unsecured wireless networks. You may remember the Australian Government making an inquiry into the matter, and google later making a public apology for the incident on their blog.

However what I find more disturbing than there being 4 major instances of privacy leaks in under a year is how little public concern there is for these issues. Sure they get featured in the news for a week or so but the next week something else happens (ie. a royal wedding) and it all just gets forgotten about, it is as if people's sense of privacy has been numbed by this new web 2.0 generation whereby millions of people put very sensitive data onto Facebook or Twitter without any thought of the consequences.
In addition the consequences for the two companies whose problems have now been resolved and forgotten about were very minimal:

"Vodafone will escape any form of punishment even if the Privacy Commissioner finds it breached privacy laws that may have affected millions of customers.

The telco is likely to face the same fate as Google Australia, with an apology on its blog the only consequence for conducting what Communications Minister Stephen Conroy described as possibly the biggest privacy breach in the Western world."
(Australian IT)

The public should have a greater concern for privacy especially considering how easy it is now to access data from the internet. People should be more aware that any information that is put on the internet is potentially up there for all to see, even if they try to take it down...
Even this week you might have seen that a couple have decided to have an internationally filmed wedding where potentially billions of people will watch it, their sense of privacy must be so poor...

Having said all that I do think we sometimes completely overreact about the data that is being collected about us, especially data that google collects, and while you wait for my next post you should check out one of my favourite xkcd comics about privacy: http://xkcd.com/792/

And if you are an unlucky playstation user that now no longer has any privacy or a multiplayer network to play on then you should check out this guide of 5 things that you should be doing while PSN is down, I especially like the "Win a real trophy" idea...


Petey

Montage!

I've been putting on my arty hat for the last couple of days and I must say that I have been thoroughly enjoying it! I have had two projects running parallel for the last week which have both been tricky but I think I pulled them both off pretty well and am looking for more to do! The first project was a poster for uni and the second a website; both of these I'll expand later.

But first! I have an upcoming conference that I'm attending next week and I'll be dabbling in some of the media aspects of it to help out, one task given to my brother and I is to create a montage each night of some of the photos taken during the day. Now creating the montage is not so difficult, generally you can just chuck heaps of photos into an iMovie template, make a few tweaks and tada! However the difficult part is finding amazing montage music! So for the last couple of nights I've been scouring the internet for great montage music, this requires listening to hundreds of songs from all over the place and trying to determine whether the song will work as a montage. I've found a couple that I like and the best one so far in my opinion is by an indie band called the "freelance whales", it's just got that kind of montage funk that I need. I also found this other song by a band called Barcelona , it's an amazing song (but probably not very good for a montage) but I can't buy it anywhere in Australia! It is so frustrating that I try as hard as I can to legally buy an album but nowhere will let me... Sanity said they have it in stores so I might pop in tomorrow and have a look, here's to hoping.
Anyway back to topic, if you know any good montage songs please let me know, even though it is quite enjoyable listening to heaps of songs on youtube to find that perfect one, it can become tedious at times...

Back to my art streak.
I managed to tick off 2 boxex on my list of things I must do in my life; making a mobile website, and a podcast. For some this would cause a great groan as you think how shallow my life is but to me it was quite an achievement.
The reason for making these two things is for this conference that I was just discussing, what they wanted was a website to upload podcasts of the talks after each of the sessions where users can either access it on their phone and listen to them there or go to iTunes and subscribe to the podcast and listen there, now having never done either of these before I thought it'd be a great experience to go all web 2.0 (or are we up to 3.0?) and bust up a cool website.
If you're interested in how I did it then read on, if you're allergic to code then here's the place to skip top the next paragraph (don't say I haven't warned you)....
To begin I created a normal page with a nice looking table and a list of available tracks to download, without going into the details I managed to detect what kind of device is accessing my page and then change the css stylings (the look of the page) appropriately to match the device. It was surprisingly easy and I can put up the code if you're really easy (to be honest just google it and you'll probably be able to figure it out) but it was a good learning curve on both how to actually do it and how to make content look good on a phone.
To make the podcast was a little more tricky, first you need to make an xml document that has a list of all your tracks on there, iTunes then reads this xml document as an RSS feed and updates when you add another item, you then need to add specific tags (piece of code for those that have no idea what I'm talking about) for iTunes to read your podcast and output the correct data to the downloadee and finally you need to upload it to a site somewhere.
All in all I was quite impressed that I managed to do both of these things in a night but I was on a bit of a roll and so am now looking for what to do next!

Finally the second arty thing I made was this poster for university.

As a group project I am part of a team with 3 other people who must create an application that searches through tweets and display trends depending on what you search for. For part of the assessment we needed to make a poster about our project and we had this great idea of making one look exactly like twitter and have all of the required information displayed as tweets. I, the supposedly arty one, was given the task of making this poster on photoshop something you might think isn't too difficult. However you don't notice the really small details of a webpage until you have to recreate it exactly and twitter has a lot of little lines that you never notice until you've almost finished and then you find one and have redesign the whole thing again. Anyway I'll upload it and you can take a look, I think it turned out pretty well (if you click it, it will expand).

I'll let you all get back to your lives now, I'm not even sure if this post is even interesting to many of you but there are some of you that just read this to procrastinate... and I'm happy to help facilitate that anytime. If you want to further procrastinate then you can go and look for some montage songs for me and leave them as a comment :D

Petey

Polls

To begin I must apologise for the complete lack of blogging over the last week or so, it's currently the last week of the university term and so it's been a bit assessment heavy and funnily enough lecturers do not appreciate me using their studying time writing blogs, unless of course it's somehow furthering my studies in a course... of which it's not. But the next couple of weeks are holidays so you should expect an influx of my rantings.... Now on to this week.

Whilst checking up on the news on my trusty ABC website I came across this poll section. You may or may not have come across this webpage before but for those who haven't it's just a page where you can vote on anything from a local or international contentious issue to a question like "Which type of ball should the PM have taken to the Oval Office?" but not only can you vote you can also view the results of the past 534 polls. Now I know I've discussed polls before I can't help but enjoy dwelling over them, looking for interesting results from the past, seeing how the polled issue has actually panned out and whether the general public was actually right in it's decision.
For instance one that is especially poignant this week is this question which was asked around the time of the QLD floods (Mid Jan): "Will the Defence Force investigation into sexual misconduct effect change?" Now if you haven't followed the news this week a young female was filmed having sex with another man without her consent and another lady just this morning said that her niece had been raped whilst at the academy and was told to "suck it up" by an officer, this has made way for fresh new calls for an investigation into the conduct of people at the Defence Force Academy. Interestingly enough the poll asked in January had a result of 86% of people announcing that they thought that the previous investigation would have no effect on the culture at the Academy, so here the public got it right in that there has been no apparent effect of the previous investigation on the Academy. So is a further investigation enough or do we need to do something more drastic? One would hope that after these events the culture within this and many other organisations changes.

There are some strange results in there as well, for instance the question "Has the Government gone about introducing a carbon tax correctly?" polled at only 54% of people saying no, however if the poll was so close then why did Julia Gillard's public rating drop so dramatically as a result of the announcement?

Climate change appears quite often in the questioning and I particularly find this one interesting: "Is the recent extreme weather a symptom of climate change?" where it finished dead even on 50% either way. It's a very good representation of the insecurity of the public at this time about how our nature is behaving and what is just normal earth phenomenon and what the human race has actually caused.

It's also good to see the Australian spirit in some of the answers, for instance when asked "How do you feel about the $1.8billion flood levy?" out of the four possible answers "Happy to pay" won by a margin of 15 pts at 55%.

And finally just to add a little spice to the blog "Does the NBN's business case look solid?" 53% no, 25% yes...

Just before I go a couple of quick links:

Buying the Presidency - If you were interested in my politics course or the American President race then check out this video, the man interviewed (Dr John Hart) is both my lecturer and tutor for that class and really knows his stuff, it was funny listening to his reaction about the interview afterwards and how he thought the questions asked were really stupid.

Q&A - I hope you were watching Q&A the other night with Kevin Rudd on it, I love to see word maps of the transcript afterwards to highlight the key topics of conversation and this little video was a word map of all the twitter comments made during the program (at one stage they got to 500 tweets a second). It's very interesting to see how the tweets and wider public discussion progressed throughout the show, if you've got a spare 60 seconds it's definitely worth a look.

Anyway take a look through the other ABC polls and leave a comment below on any other results you find interesting...

Petey

Sport

I find it strange that although every sporting team that you support can lose their respective sporting event during the weekend, the weekend can still be classed as a great weekend. Take the weekend that has just passed for instance; you may or may not know that I am an avid Forumla 1 fan and when the melbourne grand prix comes around all other tasks for the weekend become priority number 2 (meaning they never get done).
Being a true Australian I support Mark Webber on his quest to winning the world championship (which should be in the bag this year) but this year I have started a dream team for Formula 1 (Weird I know, how do you even score that?!?) so it has meant that my support has been distributed further than just Red Bull.
To summarise a very complex system of the dream team you have a set budget and you have to pick 4 drivers, 2 cars and a team. In all my wisdom I thought that Mercedes had some pretty good pre-season testing, were cheap, had Schumacher and Rosberg two great drivers and would probably win out of the mid range cars (so average maybe a 6-8th placing). In addition, for my drivers I choose Mark Webber (of course) two other drivers (that you don't need to know about) and Rubens Barrichello a great sensible, reliable driver (who for some strange reason had to be my double pts guy). This was all looking pretty good and I was confident going into the weekend. However come race day Barrichello decides to crash into Rosberg taking both of them out of the race and then Schumacher then had to retire for some reason I can no longer remember, Mark decided to fail once again and came 5th and so all in all the race was a complete disaster.
However it was still great! Having the season back on and watching all the improvements to all the cars was brilliant! Mark Webber could have had a season ending crash and I probably would have still loved the weekend.

Secondly; my sister, her husband and I went and saw the ACT Brumbies saturday night at Canberra Stadium. They are our local Rugby Union team and we normally go down to the pub on a fri/saturday night and watch their games. This year has been a bit of a flop for the Brumbies, however this week was the grudge match - the one we had to win. Our opponents were the Waratahs a team from just across the border and this is always the Australian match to watch, the local derby, the battle of the greats, the one you need to win... and we were confident of a win.

We lost... on the siren. Pretty much the worst way to lose, apart from the previous match where the scoreline was 52-10 and it was just embarrassing.
But even that can't ruin a great sporting weekend, it's great! If you want to know the secret to a great weekend then just watch sport... or if you don't like sport then uh, go shopping or something...

So what have we learnt this weekend? a) Sport is great, b) Peter took a really long time to blog this post considering the weekend was 4 days ago...

Petey

Fireworks

Canberra had a heavy dose of fireworks last night, I always find it funny that I generally enjoy the period leading up to the fireworks more than the fireworks themselves. I'm sure many people are in my boat too, sure all those big bangs and bright flashes are fun but it's the catching up with people you haven't seen for a while or meeting new people that always seems to be more enjoyable. It's strange that in these days people would never just go to a park and enjoy an afternoon in the sun with other people but would easily spend an afternoon on the shore of Lake Burley Griffin in the rain and cold just to see some fireworks.

One thing thats good about the fireworks is seeing the "new" firework for that year, generally it's some shape that I'm sure wouldn't be easily to make, before it's been love hearts, smiley faces, etc. This year (I'm sure I'm about to be corrected on this) it was a moon shaped firework, or at least I don't think I've ever seen a moon shaped firework before, what they should do is take suggestions for the next "new" firework, maybe next year it could be the apple logos shape, I'd respect that.

Just one more note about fireworks; the soundtrack. Now this year we weren't very near a radio to be able to hear the songs in the background which does sort of detract from the whole experience but we were able to hear glimpses of songs. Now what I really want to know is whether Katy Perry purposefully made a song titled "firework" because surely she knew that it would be played at pretty much all firework shows around the world. If you think about it, it's a pretty good marketing strategy because you've almost guaranteed that millions of people would hear the song whilst enjoying their time watching fireworks, genius! Maybe I should make a song called "I love New Year fireworks" or something similar...

Wow, a whole blog post without mentioning politics... I'd better not ruin it and let you go, don't forget to post a comment below about how much you love the idea of an apple logo shaped firework.

Petey