Schinckel.net

I’ve had a couple of “challenging” comments on a couple of posts I’ve made over the past couple of days. It all stems from the fact that a large group of students have “discovered” my blog, and decided to make some comments about and on it. This is not the first time that students I teach have come across it, but in the past, they appeared to be a bit more mature about how they dealt with the fact that I am a person, not just a teacher. I’m close to putting moderation on the posts, as it’s somewhat annoying to have to remove those that I deem to be inappropriate. Which brings me to the point I want to make. By commenting on a person’s blog, you are effectively visiting their house, and leaving your mark. It’s my blog, I’ve put a lot of effort into tweaking the template, and even more into creating content that is, to me at least, meaningful and sometimes important. I reserve the right to remove comments I decide are inappropriate. I’ll usually leave comments that are opposing to my point of view, except if I feel they go too far. If it gets too bad, I’ll just block access from a variety of IP addresses. Like yours.

One site I am responsible for is that of my Touch club, Central Scorpions. I did have a blog set up, but have migrated to the system my association uses for results and fixtures. I set up a lovely domain name, and using stealth forwarding, I had that stay in the address bar. We really only want people to visit via the main page, anyway, so that doesn’t raise issues of not being able to bookmark a specific page. However, using IE (Win), if I have a stealth forwarding setup, the site runs v.e.r.y…s.l.o.w. Under Firefox (Mac) it’s fine, and if I use a standard redirect, this is fine too. So, stealth forwarding must do something strange, that IE doesn’t like in conjunction with the js for the rollovers, I think. It may have something to do with the way it’s set up as a frame, I’m not sure.

I’ve just had my wireless router delivered, and I wanted to set it up without disconnecting from the internet for now. But when I try to connect to it, I get forwarded to the netgear website. Pissing me off…

Well, the title sums it up. There doesn’t seem to be a way to store a list of items in a Microsoft Access database. For instance, I have an item that may belong on several categories, but I can’t just have a LIST datatype, and have a list stored in here. Instead, I’ll have to have yet another table that has relationships, which further complicates the database. And makes creating a form for entering data more difficult.

I have an application where I need to have categories, and each category can have a parent category. However, I can’t do this in Access using one table, as tables cannot have entries that refer to items in themselves. So, I’ll need to have a Category table, and also a Category Parents table, which has the relationships in it. Bah.

It’s really cool that people are still working on the Firmware upgrades for the NSLU2, and I went to upgrade the firmware today to try to get MySQL working properly. The file is 6.5 MB, and my download keeps failing at 3 MB. And I can’t resume, as I can’t find the actual address - they’ve done a pretty good job of making that hard to find. Annoying…

I don’t understand who makes the decisions as to what gets into the newspaper in the city in which I live. For instance, on page 4 today:

Cigarettes sold, no questions asked. Yesterday, Megan Wilsdon, of North Adelaide, was able to buy a packet of cigarettes from a city convenience store, despite having only recently turned 18.

So, what is the issue? The girl is over 18, hence is allowed to buy cigarettes. Get some real news.

I hate the growing trend in Urban areas for zones that are not pedestrian friendly. For instance, not having paved footpaths in residential streets makes it much harder for people to walk around their local community. This is especially evident in places like West Lakes, where everyone has a car. Hell, in Adelaide, _everyone _has a car. However, today after dropping my car off for a service, I began the long walk into town. I initially waited for the bus, but decided I’d wander into Bunnings first. So, I did. First bad point of Adelaide Roads, which is not a pedestrian issue, but rather a car issue. Where they’ve made the new connector between Deakin Terrace and Burbridge Road, or rather Don Bradman Drive, they’ve totally fucked things up. If you head South-West down the connector, you cannot go down Deakin Terrace, only South Road when you reach the end. Similarly, coming up from Deakin Terrace, you cannot head up the connector, but still only go North up South Road. Why the hell build a big expensive connector, and then don’t connect it up properly? But I digress. There is no footpath anywhere along said connector. I had to walk through garden beds, treading carefully around bark chips. And then into Bunnings, which is another notoriously unfriendly pedestrian area. I’m not sure if it’s so people cannot walk into the carpark and store, or if it’s so people cannot park there and go somewhere else. I guess as far as they are concerned, if people haven’t come in their cars, they aren’t going to be buying enough… Finally, I headed off from Bunnings and into town. And this was where things got worse. Not only was there no path on the northern side of the Hilton Bridges, but you cannot actually get through. I had to hike up and down a couple of hills, jump across safety barriers, and cross a road on a blind corner. By this stage, I was rather angry. Finally, to make my morning complete, I was attacked by a crazy little bird as I wandered through the parklands. I had to protect myself with the laptop case I was carrying.

I received a comment on one of my blog posts about http://australia.sms-txt.co.uk, an apparently free method of sending SMS text messages over the internet. Don’t use this system, for several extremely important reasons:

• Your recipient does not recieve your message, but instead a placeholder message, to which they must either send a premium priced message to a 19-number - minimum cost of 50c, I don’t know the actual cost, or visit a website, and pay 50c via PayPal to view the message.
• It’s system for sending a message requires you to add a person to your address book first, you can’t, like SMSPup.com.au send a message to someone, and then decide to add them to your Address Book.
• The system is very insecure. You are given a link with a number at the end to visit a website. It is possible to change this number, and then view the message of someone else. Or, at least, I assume it is. I wasn’t going to waste 50c to see if this is the case. If a message can only be viewed once, then it would be possible to hijack someone else’s messages, if you were prepared to pay the money, thus preventing them from viewing them.
• You cannot send a second message until a person has replied/retreived the first. What happens if the person chooses not to? You cannot send them another…

Thus, this system is not free. Whilst it costs nothing to send, it costs at least 50c to retrieve. This is contrary to the normal way SMS charges are applied in Australia, which are sender-based. At least you can choose not to retrieve a message, so if “James” keeps sending me SMSs, I can ignore him. Similar to how Optus keeps sending me advertising MMSs. And I keep ignoring them.

Whilst most of the stuff in WoW update 1.11 is great, there are a couple of things that have come to my attention as being problematic. The first and most obvious is the global LookingForGroup chat channel. It has meant that everyone in every zone can see every LFG from the other zones. This alone is bad news, as it makes the traffic level in this chat too high. But it gets worse. People have started using this channel as a trade channel, as they now get access to everyone, everywhere. It means that most of the time, people will now be forced to turn this channel off. Secondly, and only obvious to Druids, is the subtle change that has been made to flight paths - you can now only fly to Rutheran Village out of Moonglade, wheras before you used to be able to pick a flight path, and chain out of Moonglade.