More Thoughts on Australia's Internet Censorship plans

I sent a letter to Stephen Conroy expressing my view that ISP level filtering in Australia would cause a significant negative performance impact on the internet and that the resources (money) spent on the filter would be better spent elsewhere (ie: law enforcement).

I wonder if Stephen Conroy would like to drive a car with a speed limiter that automatically set it's speed limit based on signs on the side of the road....

If it performed like the ISP tests have shown, then it would certainly get the speed wrong some of the time, perhaps limiting him to drive at 80km/h on a freeway or allowing him to drive at 100km/h in a suburban street! Not good for the traffic, and certainly not going to eliminate the possibility of him speeding.

I also support the letter written by Mark Newton, which you can read here. The guy has clearly done his homework, obviously more so than Senator Stephen Conroy.

Say no to censorship of the Internet! Spend the resources on police to catch people doing illegal activities instead of hampering the online performance of an entire country.

Using python to examine your iTunes library

I recently noticed a bunch of music files were missing from my iTunes music library. Here's a simple python program I write to find which ones were missing... (iTunes tells you, but in a modal dialogue window so you can't look at the list and check your library at the same time)

import plistlib
import urllib

filename = "/Users/matt/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml"


def check_file(dict):
 location = dict['Location']
 
 try:
  
  # try the url
  u = urllib.urlopen(location)
  
  # close it
  u.close()
  
  # if we get here, it was ok
  ok = True
  
 except:
  ok = False
 
 if (not ok):
  print "file not found: " + location


print "Reading iTunes xml file..."
x = plistlib.readPlist(filename)

tracks = x['Tracks']

for key in tracks.iterkeys():
 check_file(tracks[key])

xbox 360 - first thoughts

Now I have an xbox360, and a few games thanks to the promotional deals on at the moment.

Interesting product. Great out of the box experience so far.

The signing up for xbox live is a bit of a long winded task with the xbox controller. Perhaps it's easier to do on a computer and then simply log in using the xbox.

3 software updates downloaded and installed on the first day. I expect this is pretty standard.

I'm pretty impressed at how quickly game results appear on xbox.com - albeit the xbox.com website is terribly slow (must be running on microsoft software... tehehe)

Nice to see that the network support is easy to use. Pity that they only have media sharing software for microsoft windows based pcs.... but... that is microsoft.

I'll be sure to try out some of the Mac and Linux based media sharing apps soon, and will post how it goes.

No Clean Feed

Say no to internet censorship in Australia! Read here for more information from Electronic Frontiers Australia!

I believe that internet censorship should not be allowed because of two primary reasons:

Firstly, I consider this to be an invasion of civil liberties. Whilst I no way condone the use of the internet for criminal or illegal activities, I believe that the law must be enforced without the hinderance of our civil liberties, specifically including the freedom to access information.

Secondly, I believe that a filter to the internet would be a great negative for the performance of data communications in the country. The infrastructure required to filter a nations content would be extremely expensive, and would slow down the rate of data transfers whilst performing filtering activities. This would ultimately lead to decreased performance of the internet, and increased cost of internet services for consumers.

Additionally, I do not believe that an internet filter would be very effective. It is already very easy to establish a secure encrypted communications channel over the internet between two computers. Banks have this security. The same encryption technologies can also be used to set up secure encrypted gateways between machines. This is virtually impossible to filter.

Support freedom of information in Australia!

iPhoto Library Manager

I've had a hell of a time using iPhoto recently - it's been really really really slow, and buggy - crashing a lot, etc.

After a bit of searching, i found this program: iPhoto Library Manager.

It's a really neat utility, that can manage multiple libraries, and also serves as a utility to rebuild your photo library which makes iPhoto much much faster - and let's hope more reliable.

So if iPhoto 6 is being a dog, then give this a whirl!

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Internet Explorer is the bane of my life.

Internet Explorer is the bane of my life. Need I say more.

Every time I look up a standard for HTML / CSS / Javascript, it works on every browser I have, except Internet Explorer. Almost consistently. It is just terrible.

Wordle and Delicious

I've been using delicious for a while to bookmark things i find interesting.... This page generates a word map of your interests based on the tags you use in delicious.

I think it's a pretty accurate reflection of my interests.... don't you?



Anyone interested can look into my bookmarks at:

http://del.icio.us/soundevolution

-matt