Category: General

Photos from 14-15 August 1947 – Indian Transfer of Power ceremonies

General No Comments
Nehru
Reading Time: 2 minutes

My uncle, Jayantilal B. Nallawalla was commissioned by Lord Mountbatten to be his private photographer a few months before and during the Indian independence day (“Transfer of Power”) ceremonies. For the first time, his photos are being released online. As a teenager, I was privileged to communicate with Lord Mountbatten for several years and his unsolicited kindness ultimately helped me to emigrate to New Zealand.

These photos were printed in B&W from a colour film roll, so some sharpness has been lost.

14 August 1947

Lord Mountbatten transferring power from Britain to India
Lord Mountbatten transferring power from Britain to India

Jawaharlal Nehru played a major role in the Indian independence struggle and became India’s first Prime Minister. Continue reading →

HP giveaways via 25 websites

General No Comments
Reading Time: < 1 minute

Twenty-five assorted websites, some with a student audience, are participating in a computer giveaway between 12 August and 9 September. I have no connection with any of this, except my friend in NZ Mauricio Freitas of GeekZone has put up a convenient website BacktoSchoolGiveaways that will let you reach all the participating sites. Each site will devise its own competition, so if you are keen, you should visit them all in turn during the period of their contests and try your luck.

The prizes look quite tempting – each site has a prize bundle that includes a laptop, an operating system, some software and a backpack. Good luck.

Unwanted fax spam?

General 7 Comments
Reading Time: 2 minutes

If you have a non-business fax machine, as I do, you may get unwanted spam faxes from businesses who use UTBox, which is based in Sydney. UTBox has a “fax opt-out facility” which is after the fact, i.e. you can “opt out” after you have received the unwanted fax. The press release says:

To make it easier for those marketers who wish to utilise an online fax broadcast opt-out mechanism we have introduced dontfax.me. dontfax.me is a website where receivers of un-wanted faxes can register their wish to opt-out.

This is not accurate. If you go to http://dontfax.me, you get this unhelpful screen:

Enter the URL? Isn’t this where one can opt out?

I have no idea if there was an intention to provide an opt-out form there, but the source code of the home page is bewildering. Yes, there is nothing else in the code than what you see below:

<table cellpadding=10 border=0>
<tr>
 	<td>
		<img src=/images/logo.jpg>
	</td>
	<td>
			Please enter the URL with the company name included
	</td>
	</tr>
<!--
<tr>
	<td colspan=2>
		Tired of wasting paper with your fax machine? Try an <a href="http://www.utbox.net/fax_by_email/">internet fax solution</a> so that your faxes come directly into your email.
	</td>
</tr>
!-->
</table>


Go Green and Save with RingCentral FaxSo far I have received unwanted faxes from the following companies. If you want to avoid getting faxes from them, use the URL next to them to supply your fax number:

If you know of other opt-out URLs, please add them as comments.

Contact the Advertisers

Here are some contact points for the advertisers in case you want to get in touch:

  • Better Telecom = Phone 131 501
  • Global Rags, Richmond VIC 3121 = Phone: 03 9528 3100. Fyshwick = Phone: 02 6248 6011. (and numerous other outlets in Australia)
  • MDF Cleaning = Phone 1300 633 237 (their removal code ACYC didn’t work and the advertiser when called sounded like I wasn’t the first complainant)

    Unsuccessful attempt to unsubscribe
    Unsuccessful attempt to unsubscribe
  • Messages on Hold = Fax: 08 9260 4445
  • Wine Growers Direct, Port Melbourne VIC = Phone 1800 635 331
  • (Nameless entity, advertising 7 Nights Bali Accommodation) = Phone 1800 851 184. In spite of using the nofax.com.au service below to opt out, they spammed me again. Tried to opt out again on 14 September 2009, but note that this form accepts any random, made-up number and tells you that the number was removed. I found their website – Bali Getaways – the domain is owned by Agora Commerce ABN 20782712830. Contact details can be fetched via the form at AusRegistry.
    Unsuccessful attempt to unsubscribe
    Allegedly successful attempt to unsubscribe

Other Fax Broadcasters

The following don’t appear to use UTBox:

EC Credit Control = Fax 1300 361 080

Why Do They Spam?

Simple, as with email spam, as long as enough suckers buy, it is worth the trouble. I have disconnected my fax/printer from the phone line, so it won’t get any more spam. For those of you who need to keep the fax connected, just hope that the technology will be obsolete soon. That date is overdue.

Maurice Jarre – What Wikipedia hoax?

General No Comments
Reading Time: 2 minutes

The ABC (Australia) reported on 7 May:

Student’s Wikipedia hoax dupes newspapers: report

Posted Thu May 7, 2009 6:01am AEST

An Irish student’s fake quote on the Wikipedia online encyclopaedia has been used in newspaper obituaries around the world, the Irish Times reported on Wednesday.

The ABC article has attracted comments criticising reporters as being lazy when they use material from Wikipedia. One commentator Toby9000 asked, “OK, so which “major British, Indian and Australian newspapers” are we talking about here?”

If you searched Google for the phrase (note quote marks and the negative term Fitzgerald to ignore recent articles about the hoax):

“When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear” -Fitzgerald

You won’t find many newspaper results in Google around the time of Jarre’s death. I found only one from a newspaper – the Sydney Morning Herald. The Google snippet looks like this:

Life was one long soundtrack | smh.com.au
He had said: “When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear.” Telegraph, London;. Guardian News & Media …
www.smh.com.au/national/obituaries/life-was-one-long-soundtrack-20090331-9i7f.html?page=-1

Here is the link to the SMH article, but you won’t find the quote in it anymore. The pages are not cached. As if to fend off a MediaWatch story (as another commentator had hinted), the quote has been removed.

Almost. The Irish student’s quote included this snippet, “One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack.” The title of the SMH article still reads, “Life was one long soundtrack”. :neutral: Hoax or not, that’s a great attribution for the late composer.

The Guardian obituary of 31 March has been amended with this acknowledgment:
This article was amended on Friday 3 April 2009. Maurice Jarre died on 28 March 2009, not 29 March. We opened with a quotation which we are now advised had been invented as a hoax, and was never said by the composer: “My life has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life.” The article closed with: “Music is how I will be remembered,” said Jarre. “When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head and that only I can hear.” These quotes appear to have originated as a deliberate insertion in the composer’s Wikipedia entry in the wake of his death on 28 March, and from there were duplicated on various internet sites. These errors have been corrected.

Democratisation of the Web or Copyright?

General 1 Comment
Reading Time: 3 minutes

Two news stories a world apart remind me that doing something quickly and cheaply is not always appreciated, at least by some vested interests.

The first story is about the first CIO of the United States. Indian-born, but raised in Tanzania and the US, Vivek Kundra. Apparently this wunderkind has impressed Barack Obama enough to create this position, where he will be tasked with lowering the cost of government operations through the use of technology.

To quote the linked article:

In just 19 months with the District, Mr. Kundra has moved to post city contracts on YouTube and to make Twitter use common in his office and others. He hopes to allow drivers to pay parking tickets or renew their driver’s licenses on Facebook.

An earlier article in the Washington Post mentions his time as CTO of the District of Columbia where he questioned a $39,000 price tag to reassign the IP addresses of a network.

“Why would that take $40,000?” he snapped. “This project seems like a sham right now. We need to take the happiness level down for this one.”

The “happiness level,” a measure of a project’s success, is just one of the tools Kundra, 34, has developed in his quest to improve the way the District’s 86 agencies use technology. In the 18 months since joining Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s administration, Kundra has gotten attention for taking an unconventional approach to government, which is not typically first to adopt the latest computing trends.

Kundra has introduced popular consumer tools to bureaucratic processes, runs his office like a tech start-up and works by the mantra that citizens are “co-creators rather than subjects.”

And this:

The bidding process for city contracts is posted on YouTube, for example, and his employees use versions of Wikipedia and Twitter in the office. He wants to let drivers pay parking tickets and renew driver’s licenses on Facebook.

In October, he launched a contest called “Apps for Democracy” to encourage developers to create applications for the Web and cellphones to give District residents access to city data such as crime reports and pothole repair schedules.

Comments left by readers are polarised. Some love his approach; one wrote bitterly:

1. It costs money to bid the project- This means Bid and Proposal work needs to be performed. Contracts people, legal, and all of these things contribute to contract costs.

2. Contractors cost money. I don’t work for wages as a citizen of Pakistan or India. I reside in Northern virginia and the cost of living is just a bit more than that hut in a major city in India or Pakistan.

There’s nothing in the articles to suggest he outsourced anything to offshore workers, but I like his approach. I don’t believe he is replacing stodgy computer systems entirely with Facebook applications written by contest winners – he is simply adding a way for people to use familiar technology.

That story takes me to the second incident closer to home. Asher Moses reported that a Sydney programmer is being threatened with legal action by NSW authority RailCorp for selling Transit Sydney, an iPhone app that he sells for AU$2.49. It enables users to get the publlished suburban train timetables on their iPhones.

The programmer, Alvin Singh, is quoted as suggesting that RailCorp is in the “planning stages” of getting their own iPhone application on the market, but he doesn’t think a government body could do this “any time soon”.

There is also the matter of copyright of the timetable compilations, as this application merely repurposes that static information, not up-to-date situational facts such as cancellations and delayed schedules. Fair enough — a commuter would rather have the latest data.

Both incidents remind me of an ever-present struggle between entrepreneurs who want to “knock up” something and use it and the traditionalists who want things done the “right way”. My guess is that RailCorp would take at least three people and about $50,000 to create that application — a business analyst, a developer and a tester, whereas Mr Singh probably knocked it up in a weekend.

Should three jobs be at risk because a citizen took the initiative and launched a rather basic app? I hope not, but I wish RailCorp simply released their application rather than pursue Mr Singh. Commuters can decide which one they’d rather use.

Similarly, US citizens are justified in wondering if government projects will be offshored to save money at the cost of local jobs. OTOH, US taxpayers would rather see their contributions spent frugally and wisely. There are no clear-cut answers here.

Wynn Las Vegas Promo Code during CES

General 2 Comments
Reading Time: < 1 minute

If you haven’t booked a room for your visit to CES 2009 in Las Vegas, you can’t go wrong at $139/night (plus taxes) at the Wynn. The discount coupon code is RHHED07. [No, I don’t get a commission from them] :lol:

Here is a direct link to the Wynn Reservation form.

The rates are valid for the month of January but the cheapest rooms at $129 are gone for the CES period. Suites begin at $149.

Alexa changes measurement methodology

General 1 Comment
Reading Time: < 1 minute

SEO conversations won’t be the same again. Everyone who knows about Alexa’s ranking system has an opinion about it. Most are not complimentary, because Alexa relied on traffic measurement based on people who had installed its toolbar, or others like me, who use a third-party tool such as the SearchStatus extension for Firefox, which sends usage data to Alexa. Toolbars tend to be installed by advanced computer users and the Alexa toolbar has a large North American following, so it might not show reliable traffic trends for a site with an Australian focus.

Alexa has just announced that it will now use a new measurement technique rather than rely entirely on the toolbar. Without giving anything away, it said, “We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.”

Until Alexa is ready to share details of those multiple sources, we can only speculate that some of it will come from major ISPs, either directly or through other services that already have such an arrangement and are permitted to share it with Alexa.

For the time being, you can only see six months’ worth of historic data. Alexa says that soon the older data will be available, with better normalisation of non-USA data.

AP sues Moreover (Verisign) for snippeting

General No Comments
Reading Time: < 1 minute

Rich Ord of WebProNews has reported a bizarre lawsuit that could make us check if we have been transported back in time to 1999. Read it and contemplate what harm Associated Press (AP) could do to the Internet if it wins this lawsuit.

This post and millions of other blog posts are linked to and snippeted by syndication mechanisms every day. AP is suing because Moreover aggregates news and sells the aggregation to subscribers (I am not one of them); unfortunately, the case goes beyond AP’s need for recompense. A win could cause others to sue, for example, Google for crawling their website and reproducing snippets in search results. AP’s lawyers used this language:

6. Defendants are also trespassing on AP’s chattel by using search robots or “crawlers” to retrieve information from AP’s computer servers in order to display, archive, cache, store, and/or distribute AP’s proprietary works.

That sounds exactly like Google, Live Search, Yahoo and many other search engines.

View a copy of the lawsuit here.

I posted a comment below the WebProNews article suggesting that a passive boycott of all email domains owned and used by AP staff, as well as their IP address range might be an interesting thought.

Those destinations should be blocked by network administrators within their own network — not suggesting any illegal action here. It is like adding ap.com to one’s email spam filters. Such a boycott is not likely to happen, but if it did, it would take AP reporters back to the pre-Internet days when they had to dial directly into the office or use intermediary sites to file their stories. This wouldn’t stop them from working, but a daily inconvenience might be a lasting reminder.

What do you think?

Google from a Microsoftie’s perspective

General No Comments
Reading Time: < 1 minute

This post has been backed up at Blogspot in case it disappears. It is about the alleged work environment at Google (USA) versus Microsoft (USA). It covers topics such as:

  • What is the culture really like? How many hours are people actually working? What are the least amount of hours you can work before you are looked down upon?
  • 20% of your time on personal project. How many people actually get to use it? If so, how do they use it? Does Google own your personal project?
  • What are the office arrangements like? Do you have an office or cube space?
  • What is the management structure like (hierarchy)?
  • Do they actually have plans for career development?
  • Who would you recommend Google to? Is it for the college kid or family type, worker bee or innovator?
  • Please provide any additional information that you believe will help in our battle for talent against Google?

I have worked for a San Jose company that offered some of the benefits such as free food and snacks and agree that it makes a lot of sense (for the company) to keep the employees anchored to the workplace. I have visited a few of the Redmond buildings at MSFT too and I agree that the latter does not resemble a sheltered workshop for college grads, as the Googleplex is made out to be.

Proudly powered by WordPress & Skyrocket Themes

MENU

Navigation

Mastodon