One interesting thing about moving house and then falling sick, is the 7 day black hole caused by not having Internet access, or even a computer to play on. And while my email backlog calmly waited until I was back online, my feed aggregator did not. I say did not, but the problem of course is that RSS and Atom feeds do not give the user any ability to read items from a specific date, meaning that the last 10 to 20 items don’t cover anywhere near the 7 days that I’d like to catch up on.

So now I have a 5 day or so gap in my knowledge about what happened in the blogosphere and the Internet/I.T. world. Through CNet, SMH and other sites I can find out a little about some news that I’ve missed, but this gives no additional information such as context, social effects or any more detailed research. And for the same reason that I use an aggregator, I’m not about to visit each of the 200+ sites I read each day to find out what happened.

Every few days I stumble across an issue being referred to in a blog, which I don’t completely understand, until I follow the trackbacks to find out it was a story which broke during my gap. In many ways I feel like I ceased to exist for a week, and that’s very disconcerting, especially considering it is part of my job to be up to date, and there’s nothing I can really do about.

So when I see posts about how great RSS is for keeping people informed, I grumble and bitch to myself about how people still just don’t get it. Well, slightly more than I usually do anyway.

(Originally posted to Synop weblog)

I recently moved house, and while in the old days my dial up Internet connection would simply move with me and be operational the same day, moving ADSL took Telstra 12 days. Same number, same exchange, my ISP and Telstra had two weeks warning, but still 12 days off the air, not including the time between disassembling my network and the actual line move. Then when it does finally get connected, nobody bothers to call and let me know, neither Telstra nor my ISP. I’m left to discover it myself when I accidentally restart my gateway (mental note to self: gotta move that power board out of harms way).

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, less complex, more fun and in many cases cheaper. Telstra, my ISP and the nature of ADSL provided none of these. Sure, once the connection is back up it sure beats dial up, but why should I go through the pain and suffering to get there?

Good technology just works. I shouldn’t need a shell prompt, a complex install procedure or a non-typical user interface. And I shouldn’t have to wait 12 days just to move it to another location.

(Originally posted to Synop weblog)

It is actually amazing how much time it frees up by not having access to the Internet. It gives you oh so many more hours to pace up and down the loungeroom plotting the overthrow of Telstra.

In celebration of the fact that we’re about to head into day 11 without an Internet connection, the fact that we’re rapidly approaching the “up to 12 days, but usually much less” that I was told it would take to transfer, and in a feeble attempt to generate good luck even though it is well and truly outside the bounds of my belief structure, I give to you, The Twelve Days of Telstra.

28/6 – On the first day without Internet, Telstra gave to me, a whopping transfer of ADSL fee.

29/6 – On the second day without Internet, Telstra gave to me, two empty sockets, and a whopping transfer of ADSL fee.

30/6 – On the third day without Internet, Telstra gave to me, three bad connections, two empty sockets, and a whopping transfer of ADSL fee.

1/7 – On the fourth day without Internet, Telstra gave to me, four strands of copper, three bad connections, two empty sockets, and a whopping transfer of ADSL fee.

2/7 – On the fifth day without Internet, Telstra gave to me, the — fucking shits. Four strands of copper, three bad connections, two empty sockets, and a whopping transfer of ADSL fee.

3/7 – On the sixth day without Internet, Telstra gave to me, six Telstra techos, and the — fucking shits. Four strands of copper, three bad connections, two empty sockets, and a whopping transfer of ADSL fee.

4/7 – On the seventh day without Internet, Telstra gave to me, seven dumb excuses, six Telstra techos, and the — fucking shits. Four strands of copper, three bad connections, two empty sockets, and a whopping transfer of ADSL fee.

5/7 – On the eighth day without Internet, Telstra gave to me, eight certified handsets, seven dumb excuses, six Telstra techos, and the — fucking shits. Four strands of copper, three bad connections, two empty sockets, and a whopping transfer of ADSL fee.

6/7 – On the ninth day without Internet, Telstra gave to me, a motive for my sabotage, eight certified handsets, seven dumb excuses, six Telstra techos, and the — fucking shits. Four strands of copper, three bad connections, two empty sockets, and a whopping transfer of ADSL fee.

7/7 – On the tenth day without Internet, Telstra gave to me, ten reasons to get Optus, a motive for my sabotage, eight certified handsets, seven dumb excuses, six Telstra techos, and the — fucking shits. Four strands of copper, three bad connections, two empty sockets, and a whopping transfer of ADSL fee.

8/7 – On the eleventh day without Internet, Telstra gave to me, eleven minutes of dial up, ten reasons to get Optus, a motive for my sabotage, eight certified handsets, seven dumb excuses, six Telstra techos, and the — fucking shits. Four strands of copper, three bad connections, two empty sockets, and a whopping transfer of ADSL fee.

9/7 – On the twelth day without Internet, Telstra gave to me, A, D, S L.

So we moved house, fairly successfully, and with all the crap that I cart around from place to place because I’m too sentimental to dump it all.

We’re keeping the same telephone number, but of course Telstra need to install an ADSL modem at the exchange on the new line, which according to my ISP will take up to two weeks. On top of that, it can’t be ordered through Telstra’s database until the telephone is actually switched over. So here we are, knowing we’ll be off the (Internet) air for up to two weeks, knowing which day the move will be, knowing which day Telstra will physically change the phone line over, yet not being able to warn Telstra until the new line is in place!

The irony of course is that if I was instead using that 20th century technology, a dial up modem, there would be no delay and we’d have Internet access the same day. Isn’t new technology supposed to make things easier, more flexible or cheaper? Well, ordering the change is more complex, waiting up to two weeks is not flexible, and of course we get charged by both my ISP and Telstra for the privilege.

On the day we had the telephone switched over, I had to report that the phone wasn’t actually working. So out comes the Telstra guy, late the following day of course, and finds that the Optus technician who installed the previous resident’s lines, dumped the Telstra copper under the house, before rewiring all the internal phone extensions to ride over Optus’ network instead. And of course the ADSL can’t be switched over until the line is working…

Anyway, six days without Internet access, and four days of sickening flu later, and I finally get our network set up at the new house and manage to dial in to my ISP via 56K. It aint broadband, and several machines all sharing the line isn’t very speedy, but at least I was able to download my 600 odd emails. One of which was about an expired domain name, which nobody thought to phone me about.

Telstra. Anyone who tells you that public ownership has improved Telstra, is simply full of it. Ziggy Distrust has spent the last 10 years investing in failed Internet start ups and ignoring Telstra’s core business and customer base. But of course he has, that’s what shareholders want, which sort of conflicts with their raison detre. They’re a telco for fuck’s sake, that’s what they should be concentrating on.

Public ownership of all government utilities is dumb for this very reason, even if there is a core mission statement locked up tighter than a nat’s chuff. Some utilities will be less profitable by nature of their business, which directly conflicts with the capitalist nature of stockholding. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s not right, just that they’re incompatible models.

So why am I still a customer? Good question. I’m off to ponder that one myself… making good use of the two weeks I have without an Internet connection…

Having bored you enough with the vague theoretics of controlling the publishing pipeline, which I swore I wouldn’t mention again, perhaps a few practical examples are in order, of the next small step we can make which won’t require Atom/RSS changes.

Reading books, a day at a time, is becoming ever more popular. You subscribe to the feed, and each day a new page from a classic, or not so classic, book is delivered to your aggregator. Here’s two examples: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and Leonardo Da Vinci’s Notebooks.

The main problem of course is, like buying a magazine, you need to subscribe either on the day that the first page appears, or within the few days that page 1 is still being published in the feed. Talk about timely, I thought the Internet was supposed to ease on demand media delivery. If someone is publishing a book feed, I want to start at page 1, and I want to start today!

Instead, how about if the feed was able to reset itself to day 1, and hence page 1, from the moment I subscribe to it? You’re probably thinking cookies and other technical wonders, but it’s oh so much simpler.

Create a dynamic feed URL. Each day, the URL advertised as the book’s RSS feed, includes a date parameter, like this:

http://my.example.book.com/rss/1049066444

Or, to obtain some semblance of consistency, use CGI parameters:

http://my.example.book.com/rss?start=1049066444

Now the book site knows when the feed was subscribed to, and can generate the appropriate pages based on the start date. By using human readable parameters, users could even back and forward date their reading:

http://my.example.book.com/rss?startDay=1&startMonth=4&startYear=2003

Of course a dynamic URL is going to cause havoc with sites such as Technorati and Feedster, but to be honest, that’s a problem they’re going to have to solve eventually anyway, when we move to, you guessed it… controlling the publishing pipeline

How about offering an alternative feed for your weblog, one that drip feeds a post or two each day? If I’m reading you for the first time, it might be nice to read your weblog from the very first entry, with one a day until I’ve caught up.

I’ll let you work out the natural extensions to these ideas for interrogating big media sites, but until they get the whole business model problem first, I doubt we’ll be seeing them any time soon.

If you have a dynamic URL for one of your feeds, post it here in the comments, I’m interested to see what you’ve come up with.

(Originally posted to Synop weblog)

Maggi have released a new improved 2 Minute Noodles in all the flavours that you know and love. The difference however is that these noodles are uniquely personalised for you. Maggi’s new 2 Minute Personal Noodles contains two new important technologies, and are a huge step forward into the future of food personalisation.

The personalisation begins when you buy the noodles, unique biometric finger print sensing detects your own personal prints. When the noodles are eventually opened, if the finger prints don’t match, the noodles are intentionally soiled from the inside. No more will flatmates steal your precious noodles. Now you can be sure that only you can eat the noodles that you paid for.

The second new personalisation is Maggi’s unique location sensing technology, another huge step forward in personal consumption protection technology. Once the noodles leave the store, sensors built into the packaging automatically detect it’s surroundings, locking in a unique olfactory and acoustic stamp of the first after-store location that the noodles are stored in for more than 24 hours. This unique personalisation ensures that your precious noodles cannot be stolen from your kitchen, guaranteeing that only you can prepare the noodles… in your kitchen… in your house.

Maggi call it the NRM system, or Noodle Rights Management. At a store near you. But only you.

This has got to be the best written argument against DRM and abuse of copyright conventions, a talk given by EFF and BoingBoing dude Cory Doctorow to Microsoft Research. Starts a bit rough, but ends brilliantly. We learnt these lessons back in the early 80s, why are these DRM proponents still not getting it?

I really don’t believe it has come to this, but I’m going to explain roughly how languages and spelling work in recent versions of Microsoft Word. This came about from my guilt for luring poor Word users to my site, looking for a solution for the Australian spelling problem, and finding instead my bitch about U.S. English in Word and no solution.

To clear my guilt, perhaps this summary will help fellow travellers as we wander aimlessly around Word, bug ridden compass in hand and our original inspiration for writing clearly beginning to wane, with Word’s infinite complexity firmly inserted up our collective asses. (U.S. English used intentionally, yadda yadda yadda)

In Word, any part of a document can be marked as a particular language, or the default language. This is separate from the spelling checker, so put that out of your head. Now, the nice thing about being able to mark up parts of a document with different languages, is that you can then have different character sets, grammar checking and yes, spell checking, work in the languages you’ve selected. You see, you don’t configure the spell checker for a particular language, that went away many Word versions ago. What you do is mark your selected text as a particular language, and when you select spell check, it automatically detects the language and selects the appropriate dictionary.

You see, you could have French, English and German in the same document, and when you select spell check from the menu, it will switch dictionaries when it gets to each section of marked text. Same with the grammar checker, same with character sets, and who knows what else. This is a huge change from how it used to work, and I’m amazed Microsoft hasn’t publicised it very well, especially as we’re all so used to telling spell checkers which dictionary to use. How I18N of us.

So what’s the problem with U.S. English always being selected in Australian documents? Well, you’re probably selecting the Australian dictionary in the spell check options. All that does is tell it to use Australian for default language text. Problem is, the standard template, which is loaded from disk when you select New from the menu, is set to U.S. English. Or, you may have switched languages specifically from U.S. English to Australia, without realising that you’ve only switched the language for the text where the cursor is, and anything you add from then on. As we know, the spell checker typically repositions the cursor after each mispelling, so it could very easily wrap and jump into the original U.S. English text, thus switching the dictionary back to U.S. English.

OK, so how do we fix the problem? Well, for current documents, select all in the document, then double click on the language in the status bar at the bottom of the window. Change this to Australian English, and you’re done. You’ve now changed the whole document to Australian. But, there is still the odd bug where this may not always take, and you’ll end up back in U.S. English. And that is where my bitch about U.S. English in Word post begins.

So good luck, and if this has helped you in some way, leave me a comment. 13 people found my bitch post through Google over the past 30 days, maybe you’re one of them?

British police arrest a musician in a Clash cover band who SMSed the words to The Clash’s song Tommy Gun, thinking it was a message from a terrorist, raising privacy concerns; Monty Python’s Terry Jones slams critiques G.W. in The Guardian (via lenn®, a Microsoft manager who seems to be my alter ego, or at least thinks, acts and grew up the same as me, just on opposites sides of the Pacific; Changing technologies, bags that stain near mobiles, hats that change according to mood, and jackets for the mobile phone set (via purse lip square jaw); Broadcatching, the RSS-ification of television news (via John Udell); John Kay slams corrects EMI’s David Munns that file sharing is not theft (via Lessig); a drip feed of Leonardo’s notebooks, one entry per day, the first new use of RSS since blog feeds.