Published on
April 14, 2008 in
Technology, Uncategorized, general and slug.
Tags: environment, privacy, Randwick, RFID, rubbish, Ryde, Technology, waste, watching.
Council’s these the days are now going to great lengths to insure that we are recycling and doing the right thing with our waste. The problem I have is the lengths that some Council’s are taking to ensure we comply with their recycling Policies. TI-RFid has now been inplmented in Ryde and Randwick councils; see the SMH article on Tracking device on bins ensures residents chip in. This will be used to measure the weight of bins, time of collection of bins.
“But the councils insist they are not spying on their residents’ waste habits, or planning to use the technology to increase waste levies in the future.
They say they are using the data to help identify areas where people are not recycling enough.”
“Bin weight data will help identify average bin weights by type and suburb. This information will also be used to develop waste education material,” a Randwick City Council spokeswoman, Alexandra Power, said.”
What this shows is that council’s believe they need to monitor their residents as they can not trust them to do the right thing. This could show that Council’s are trying to measure usage with the aim to charge more on the customer if their waste is high. Well only time will tell. Will be interesting to watch its progress and whether other waste services and Council’s will adopt similar strategies.
Today we remembered the Life of Ena Vera (Green) Banks 1911-2008. Who passed away last Monday. We had her funeral at Pine grove cemetery this afternoon. She got to see so much in her life; the advent of cars, transition from steam to diesel to electric trains, the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the advent of the computer, which we now take for granted. She was a women before her time. She was a women’s liber before the Women’s Liberation movement existed. She always believed in the rights of women. She was one of the first women in Australia to break the norm and wear pants, which in her day was unheard of and was frowned upon. Women were unable to buy pants then so she and her sisters made their own. She has left behind a great legacy. 4 children, 16 grand-children and 36 great-grand-children. Her greatest praise was instilling into her children the strong bond that family brings and passing this down the generations. You will be greatly missed.
Today I found that I had another DNS routing issue from my webhost MDwebhosting. My site is hosted on their Australian servers.
First I had problem when my account which was created on the 10th February was lost after a server outage, which resulted in the installation of new servers in the data centre. At this time my credit card had been billed. I had not been informed of the problem and subsequently had to call to find out why my credit card was billed but no existing service was available. They apologized for the outage. So they were able to recreate my account and issue me with a new set of name servers.
On the last three ocassions in the last 30 days, I have had 3 outages caused due to problems with DNS routing with my name servers. This also affected everyone else who was hosted on the same server. Each time I have had fairly quick resolution. The problem; why is this constantly happening? What are they doing? Who in the company keeps playing with the DNS settings?
I have never had any issues with my old hosting in Sydney SISgroup, on their Sun Debian servers.
They have one last chance and then I’m hunting for a new host.
Published on
April 2, 2008 in
Linux, Uncategorized, general and slug.
Tags: ECMA 376, ISO/IEC DIS 29500, KDE, Linux, Microsoft, ODF, Office, OOXML, OOXML standard, Open, Reuters.
God help us all. The news has been leaked that OOXML ECMA 376/ISO/IEC DIS 29500 is now a standard as reported by Reuters.
KDE on their blog did an April fools joke yesterday declaring that the OOXML is a standard and supported it after receiving a annoymous donation of $10,000 from a North American Company. The problem is the joke has turned into a nightmare, as the news, which was due to be released on Wednesday has been leaked.
OOXML is a standard and we now must show everyone that it is not a standard to even touch. Let alone let your Grandmother or pet dog look at. It will be interesting to see how it is modified and and how the standard improves and evolves into something remotely interoperable within Microsoft’s own product range formats, let alone other platforms.
Well I have made up my mind. As for me and my house will stick with ODF.