I just got my Google Wave developer sandbox account! I can’t wait to play with it, but I think I’m going to have to put my excitement on ice until I finish my exams in a week’s time. Boo.
Tags: google wave
To kill a singleton: I found this to be a useful discussion on how to write a singleton class in C++ that ensures the singleton is properly destroyed (for even multithreaded applications).
Minimal funds to fix Sydney congestion: no surprises here, but what will Sydney do? We can’t just sit here while Melbourne steams ahead. And what needs fixing about the Perth-Fremantle railway? When I was over there, I thought Transperth was almost a model of perfection…
I got an email half an hour ago that said this:
Dear Enochlau,
We notice you haven’t edited Wikipedia for some time. Perhaps you grew disillusioned with the project after seeing the corruption and bureaucracy at every level? If so, why not help us to help you. We are currently expanding our portfolio of administrator accounts, and as yours remains dormant perhaps you could consider donating it to us – to do so will take you only two minutes: change the password (if desired) and then reply to this email with your login details. We’ll do the rest!
Thank you for your time and consideration, and naturally do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.
Kind Regards,
The Wikipedia Freedom Fighters
It was apparently sent by sent by user “The C for WF” on the English Wikipedia: no user page, but yes there is an account.
What on earth is going on? (And no, I’m definitely not going to give them my account even if I haven’t edited for a while.)
NSW only gets $100m for the west metro, while Victoria is set to get $3.5bn for a metro rail tunnel in Melbourne. Disappointing, but it’s hard to say the Victorians don’t deserve it.
Categorisation of property in the common law can be quite complex, so here’s a diagram to illustrate the different types of property that can exist:
Each set of subcategories in the diagram above is an exhaustive division of its parent category. All property is either real or personal property. Personal property consists of chattels real (which includes leaseholds) and chattels personal. Chattels personal can be divided into choses in possession (such as pens and cars) and choses in action (such as copyright and a debt).
The diagram captures the main divisions, but it is possible to further subcategorise: for example, choses in action can be divided into legal and equitable choses in action. For some areas of the law, other categorisations might take centre stage, such as the distinction between corporeal and incorporeal property, and moveable and immoveable property.
Tags: property
Update: It appears that you can now get mail redirected without picking it up using POP3 (or similar). The university’s instructions have been updated: the “redirect” option now works, and it does what you think it should do.
“Sydney Mail is a new and significantly improved student email service,” announced the email from the university proudly.
The truth is that the university has delivered something that’s better, but is rather deficient in its own right: they’ve outsourced email to Microsoft so it’s all now run off Outlook Web Access. I could go on and on about why I would never use it, but I’ll just show you how to avoid using it.
The existing email system allows you to forward to a personal email address, and the university provides instructions for how to do it on the new system. Don’t follow those instructions! It is true that email will be forwarded from Outlook to your personal email but what happens is that the emails are literally forwarded! If Bob sends you an email, when it pops up in your personal email, the From field will show your university email as opposed to Bob, which is incredibly inconvenient.
The solution? Get your mail client to retrieve mail from Outlook via POP3. If you’re using Gmail like me, go to Settings > Accounts. Look for the “Get mail from other accounts” section and click the “Add a mail account you own” link. A window will then pop up; try the following settings:
Email sent to your university email won’t get forwarded instantly like it used to, but it’s a much better solution than the one offered by the university.
Tags: email, epic fail, gmail, microsoft, outlook, sydney university
In Australia, for published works where the author is identifiable, the duration of copyright is 70 years from the death of the author. This applies even if it is work performed under employment for a company; even if the company ultimately owns the copyright, the length of copyright protection is measured by reference to the human author’s lifespan.
This can seem rather counter-intuitive for the uninitiated, and for many “company-produced” works, like commercial software, it is quite difficult to determine the authors of that work, and hence when it will fall into the public domain.
On the other hand, United States copyright law has a notion of corporate authorship: copyright expires 70 years after the death of the author (as in Australia), but for works of corporate authorship, copyright expires 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever is earlier.
120 years does sound quite extreme, and the U.S. Act that extended protection to this extent has been, perhaps rightfully, chided as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” — however, the Australian Act isn’t really much better. If you assume that the average author is 40 years old and dies at 75 years, and corporate works are published not long after they are created, that’s 105 years of copyright protection on average. And since the duration of copyright of works of joint authorship (as would be many corporate works) extends to 70 years after the death of the last surviving author, the U.S. Act could, in many cases, result in a shorter copyright term than under the Australian Act. However, if the authors of the work cannot be ascertained by reasonable inquiry (i.e. for anonymous or pseudonymous works, a category that some corporate works might fall into), then copyright only extends to 70 years after publication in Australia.
Tags: copyright, intellectual property
If there’s one thing that I’ve taken away from my IT studies, it’s this: even if you come up with a new, whizbang idea, ask yourself, what problem does it solve?
Many innovative people are probably having many innovative ideas right now, but do any of these ideas solve real problems that people care about?
As an example, my pet peeve are those barcodes on posters that you’re meant to scan with your mobile phone. Telstra seems to think they’re a great idea, but really, what problem does it solve? Is it that I can’t get enough advertising in my day that I need to access promotional crap even faster? It doesn’t even save me time, and it’s not easier either. I tried it on a bus once: navigating the menus on my Nokia and trying to get the camera (which (un)helpfully zoomed in to telescopic depths) to focus on a little square on the ceiling above my head got me nowhere except for stares all round.
Anyway, back to the main point for today. Firstly, I’d say metros are good. I like metros. Nathan Rees likes metros too.
But what problem does the Central-Rozelle metro solve?
According to the Herald today, the first three stops are Central, Town Hall and Martin Place. We already have a train line that allows you convey yourself between those very three points. Then it continues on to Rozelle. What on earth is at Rozelle? The idea is, it would be seem, to make people alight from Victoria Road buses and finish the balance of their journey on the metro. Yes, Victoria Road is a parking lot during peak hour, but does this metro solve the problem? If people aren’t catching the buses right now, there’s no indication that more people will be inclined to catch buses that connect onto a metro. Look at the map yourself: Victoria Road is a nightmare because it’s the free alternative to the Lane Cove Tunnel and the Harbour Bridge, for people up north-western way (Ryde, etc).
Then there’s the Central end. The idea is to make people get off CityRail trains and force them to change onto the metro… which runs to Town Hall, Martin Place and Wynyard. Apart from the fact that those stations can already be reached by people getting off at Central, what problem is the metro solving? It’s a little crowded at times, but it works reasonably well, and the government must have been thinking that they could artificially engineer a problem by making everyone get off. It’s not going to work.
Spending $5bn for a patronage of 5,500 people is pathetic. But people will come if you solve their problems.
So what problems are there that could be solved by a metro? Buses. Sydney Buses suck. Especially the ones that run along George and Castlereigh Streets. If you stand along George Street during peak hour, every second vehicle going past you is a bus. The Wynyard bus terminal is also a nightmare; office workers queuing up for miles to get on buses destined for the northern beaches, along with the Great Wall of China, are the two man-made formations visible from space.
I’ve had this drawn up for a while, but this is a metro line, if it were built, that I think would solve problems:
Enlarge this map
With this metro, you would terminate Parramatta Road and City Road buses before Broadway. In this case, forcing people off won’t irk anyone because the ride into the city is currently torture anyway. Likewise, on the northern approach, terminate northern beaches buses before they hit the bridge. I’ve only paired two stations with CityRail stations – Central and Wynyard (I think Town Hall is beyond hope) – and moved city stations closer together. They’re further apart than bus stops, but frankly, bus stops on every block as it currently stands is a bit ridiculous. Combined with some light rail on the surface, which Clover seems more than happy to provide, this, I humbly submit, is a metro that solves the CBD’s problems.
It’s not that I think a metro can’t be a good solution, but as it stands, the Central-Rozelle metro gets Sydney nowhere.
Tags: buses, city of sydney, cityrail, google maps, metro, smh, telstra
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