Contempt

"The Federal Government has been warned that Australia will slip out of the world's top five Olympic nations if sports funding is not drastically increased." -- John Coates, president of the AOC, via the ABC.

I'm not sure I see a problem with this scenario.

Adding insult to injury:

It's bad enough that due to "heightened change procedures", I am required to submit a change request - with 14 days lead time - to compress a bunch of log files, on an 85% full filesystem. But for that change to then be rejected?

Fine, let it break. It'll cost more to fix it, then. At least I now know why my phone bill is so expensive.

A quick (and fairly obvious, now I think about it) tip for anyone who doesn't have time or inclination to manually insert dates and version numbers into changelogs: Debian's dch command (part of the devscripts package) can be used for more than just Debian package changelogs...

First, create a changelog file and edit it:

export EMAIL=your@email.address.com.zz
dch --create -c /path/to/CHANGELOG

Then, when you have a new release, either increment the version:

dch -i -c /path/to/CHANGELOG

...or give it a new version number:

dch -v 1.0.5 -c /path/to/CHANGELOG

I don't think I've seen anything much more depressing than the sight of hundreds of schoolchildren fawning over a wooden cross. Seriously. It's just plain sad that religious schools are allowed to brainwash them in this way, and more so that the government subsidises them to do so.

I don't know whether or not these schools were chosen for the report because they were populated with an unusually high number of children from ultra-religious families, but it was a considerable contrast from my time at school, where the vast majority of us were so contemptuous of religion that the school didn't even bother offering religious classes in years 10 and above...

I've written a couple of times about a change to the Pidgin IM program, which has proved particularly unpopular with users.

As I suspected might happen, the developers have finally responded to the bug that set this issue off, with a WONTFIX.

The issue is now getting a little wider exposure in the media, along with news of a fork - the rather lamely named funpidgin. While I'm always happy to see a fork - and there was certainly good reason to create this one, given that the change makes Pidgin so utterly annoying to use - I'm not entirely convinced that this one will go all that far.

A simpler way to fix the problem would be to use Artemy Kapitula's manualsize plugin - except that it had to be compiled as part of the pidgin source code, which was a bit of a pain. I have now created a standalone tarball of it, along with a Debian package. An Ubuntu package will be coming soon, when I'm not stuck using Australia's pathetic satellite broadband service. Users of Ubuntu Hardy Heron will probably want to use this package, as it is too late for it to be included in the forthcoming Guifications plugin pack, for them.

From ABC News:

Attorney-General Robert McClelland says the proposal to let some employers access workers' emails without consent is only being considered as a way to stop cyber terrorist attacks.

...because, of course, terrorists only ever use their employer's mail servers in their nefarious schemes.

Not to be outdone by the government's stupidity today:

"But deputy Opposition leader Julie Bishop says the laws will burden employers"

Yes. It's not like those poor, downtrodden employers have ever been interested in looking at the contents of their employees' email, in the past.

One of the few good acts of the previous government was the legislation and subsequent funding of the Do Not Call register, allowing those people who do not want to talk to telemarketers to opt out completely. I registered for it as soon as it went live, and I definitely noticed a reduction in the number of unsolicited calls that I received.

Unfortunately, the legislation simply did not go far enough; political organisations, polling companies and especially charities are exempt from the DNC register. The number of charities calling lately has risen considerably, and it's starting to drive me insane.

I have a rule: I will not give any money to a charity that asks me for it. That includes phone calls, doorknockers (the Consumer Action Law Centre has a good sticker that deals with them) and that incredibly annoying import from the UK - twenty-somethings with clipboards on city streets.

At this point, I will make a brief aside: if there's anyone from Amnesty International reading this, could you please screen your clipboarders better? I really don't appreciate your blow-ins asking me ridiculous questions, such as, "how long do you plan to live here?" as I exit the gates at a city railway station, and then abusing me when I tell them I don't have time to talk, because I'm rushing off to recover a server that's crashed in a large telco.

Back to the phone calls, however. Asterisk has a nice little command that will deal with telemarketers with autodialers - Zapateller. When invoked, it will play three tones that cause the telemarketer's autodialer to think that the number is not valid, and then hang up.

I put the Zapateller command into my dial plan yesterday, and today I've received three phone calls, all of which had disconnected by the time I answered them.

  ; Ring both phones
  exten => 2100,1,Answer()
  exten => 2100,n,Zapateller()
  exten => 2100,n,Dial(SIP/snom&SIP/sipura,20)
  exten => 2100,n,Voicemail(u2000)

I will eventually put a couple of seconds delay between the Zapateller command and the line that dials my two telephones, so that I don't hear any ringing at all.

Obviously, there's no way I can be sure the callers today were telemarketers, especially since I'm not paying for caller-ID, but given that I haven't received any personal calls on this line in weeks, I can be fairly confident that my phone system has only been playing tones to an autodialer...

For any Asterisk users out there using sipme as their Voice-over-IP provider who, like me, have been banging their heads against walls trying to figure out why it isn't working, it turns out that sometime in early February, they made a change to their SIP proxy setup and elected not to mention it on their website.

Their new equipment apparently doesn't like talking to Asterisk, so to make it work, it's necessary to mask the user agent string by putting the following in the [general] section of your sip.conf file:

useragent=portasipfriendly

...which I found out only after considerably websearching let me stumble upon this thread in Whirlpool.

Evidentally, I haven't made any non-Melbourne phone calls for almost two months, or I'd have discovered this earlier.

Sydney's Anglican archbishop, Dr Peter Jensen, doesn't seem to appreciate the irony of his own statements:

Dr Jensen has also warned people against dabbling in the supernatural.

He says those who are grieving over the death of a family member or friend should not try and contact them.

"This is very dangerous - meddling in the occult is never a good idea," he said.

I agree. Talking to supernatural beings and thinking that the dead might somehow resurrect themselves after, say, two days, is just plain strange.

It doesn't look like the user interface changes to Pidgin that I detailed here are going to go away any time soon, despite much concern about it. Last thing I read was that the developers had invoked the Gnome Defence, in that having too many useful features results in bloat (of course, no-one ever seems to remember that removing too many useful features results in Epiphany).

So, given that I simply cannot stand using it with the new interface, I've thrown together a very simple patch and a Debian package, replacing the chat window interface with that from an older version.

I don't know why application developers get sudden ideas to make significant user interface changes such as this:

Apparently it is intended behaviour, and there are a number of people who aren't very happy about it.

I rank this one up there with the one where Galeon had all its options and features removed.

From the ABC:

"The Senate's bid to cut energy use has caused some members of the Upper House to complain that they are too hot."

Maybe, just maybe, dear Senators, it's time to do away with your suits and ties? The same would go for all workplaces in Australia: dump the suits and turn down your AC a notch.

It was about 33 today in Melbourne, certainly nowhere near as hot as it can get, but there wasn't much wind about and it resulted in the area's tribe of overweight Collins St businessmen, who strut between buildings trying to appear important, looking quite sweaty and uncomfortable in their ties and jackets. Seriously, is a t-shirt a worse look than sweaty-suit-guy?

Australian society has thrown off virtually every one of its other Victorian-era hang-ups. Why do people persist with this? Surely, at some point, if people really want to get serious about reducing carbon emissions, it's time to realise that having to drastically cool the air around you because you're wearing several more layers than you really need to, is a pretty silly thing to do...