Violence, but not sex? Society, you confuse me.

Would you trust Australia Post to open every letter and parcel; to remove pages at random; to finger cheques and money orders; to remove objects from your mail; and, for you to never know what went missing?

Would you trust the people who don’t believe adult Australians play video games to control the secret black list of what you read on the web?

Would you trust any government, once given the power to secretly censor, not to extend that power to choke its opponents and opposition?

Australia’s Federal Government, using powers from the last Government, is planning to impose the strictest and most complete internet censorship system in the world. Only we can stop them.

The government plans to slow the internet by 87% by opening every single exchange of information to look for “unwanted” and “illegal” content. Illegal internet content is so broadly defined at law that it covers everything from Facebook, to MySpace, to Wikipedia, to YouTube.

I’ll be attending tomorrow in Sydney. You should too, wherever you are. Saturday 14 December, 2008.

11am Brisbane Square: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=42526399601
11am Hobart Parliament Lawns: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=39329861995
11am Sydney Town Hall: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=49916537640
12pm Adelaide Parliament: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=39343300875
12pm Melbourne State Library: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=46838735931
12pm Perth Stirling Gardens: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=45738419714
12pm ACT/Canberra: City Walk (near the fountain outside of the Canberra Centre): http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=38717743533

I just noticed that the song Do It 2 Nite‘s chorus is a sample from SOS Band’s Take Your Time (Do It Right). However, there’s literally no attempt to make the sample any different from the other. All they did was speed it up a bit, increase the bass and add a highhat, and add some effects. Lame!

The fact that they got the credit for coming with a bouncy house track is even worse - the sample is basically the entire chorus. Appalling. Almost like Daft Punk’s Digital Love, though, I’d have to admit, at least they only used a few seconds of audio, rather than the whole damn chorus. Their Harder Better Faster Stronger use of Coca Cola Baby was pretty darn hard to beat, though; I think they’ve redeemed themselves.

Sorry, none for you, Rockefeller.

Possibly a sign of things to come: mediati.org (all but SVN), ayhja.com and few other domains with client hosting were down, needed to login to Plesk to manually restart the VPS. Apparently had been like that the majority of the day. Great. Just great.

from a new Sony VAIO VGN-SZ56GN (aka SZ110 or something later, I’m sure). Very sexy, just installed Debian. Basically everything but wireless worked out of the box (had to install a kernel module, just a simple apt-get).

Edit: OK, so I lied. Not everything worked as well as I had hoped:

• Had to install the icky NVIDIA driver (and kernel-headers, etc..).
• Create an init script to switch between the Intel and NVIDIA xorg.conf files depending on what the switch was set to on boot.
• Update ALSA kernel modules, so that the PC speaker would mute itself when I plugged headphones in. Haven’t testing the microphone yet, but I suspect that’s been fixed too. Debian came with 1.0.14, and this was fixed in 1.0.15rc3 (which has been released). Also needed to force the vaio version of the driver. A newer version of ALSA has been uploaded by the Debian ALSA maintainers and is waiting to be accepted into sid.
• ACPI events via sony-pi are buggered - need to apply a patch so that the laptop gets detected correctly instead of falling back to an incorrect default. Either that, or use sony-laptop, I forget. (This appears to be patched in the latest kernel release - will get back to you on this one).
• A patch exists to make the Motioneye Camera on this machine appear at /dev/video0, so that other apps can access the webcam, but I haven’t tried nor bothered to get it working yet. I’m sure I’ll get around to it eventually, but it’s not really high priority for me at the moment. (Note: might be fixed by getting the above issue resolved)
• Cannot easily adjust backlight values. If I’m running on the Intel graphics adapter, I can jump into gnome-terminal/xterm/whatever, and run xbacklight -set 50; the NVIDIA card does not have an obviously apparent way to adjust the backlight brightness - it can adjust the screen brightness, but this does not equate to less power used. Using the screen brightness applet causes it to crash. (Related to sony-pi driver).
• Haven’t tried out the fingerprint reader, but I suspect I’ll need to install a driver or two to get that working properly too.

The amount of custom hardware on this machine makes the software issue worse than most other brands though; but the machine itself is pretty hard to beat - nice and light, long battery life, looks good, feature-full, and a full-sized keyboard.

I did also manage to remove the “Windows Vista(tm)” sticker; pretty damn hard mind you. :D

Edit x2: More detailed information will now live here forever.

Dear Sydney Buses,

You suck.

1. Having about four buses come all at the same time is not cool. Also, at least have the buses spread the load of passengers, instead of having everyone hopping onto the first bus, with the remaining three completely empty.
2. Drivers who don’t know where the bus stops are isn’t cool either, especially if they’re the second-most used on that route.
3. Is it hard to provide more buses to services which are obviously overcrowded? Closing an eye to the situation isn’t going to help.
4. Can’t you fucking respond to ‘good morning’? If I can be bothered to say it when I’m half-awake, you better be able to at least say something. This doesn’t apply to all bus drivers - there are some real champs out there - but most of them are just plain dickheads. In addition to being rude, some can’t even drive (including instances where drivers will drive into trees and smash the side mirror off, requiring passengers to get off the bus - it’s illegal to drive without a side-view mirror).

Also, to those who think that travel passes permit ‘free’ travel, it’s not free. It’s subsidised travel. Not free.

I honestly believe CityRail is doing a better job with their trains. I mean, morning peak hour is absolutely ridiculous, more so than buses, but the rest of the time they’re generally equal or better. At least you can get a damn seat and they come on time. Though, I do live pretty close to the city, so I’m not sure if it’d be the same if I were travelling from Hornsby or Granville.

State-government-provided transport in Sydney is an utter disgrace. Especially you, Sydney Buses. Actually, to be honest, infrastructure in Sydney is generally poor(er) of that of other states/cities. I refrains from inserting political views about the current (Mr. Iemma’s) state government.

Kind regards, Alex Hixon