This looks like a definite step in the right direction on copyright:Protecting precious parody. The article is mostly about the parody protection laws (which I actually thought we already had), but for me the kicker is half way down the page:

There are other elements to the Copyright bill, that are aimed at ensuring consumers are not treated like copyright pirates and copyright pirates are not treated like consumers. They include:

Making it legal for people to record TV or radio programs in order to play them at a more convenient time.

Legalising ‘format shifting’ of material such as music, newspapers, books - meaning people can put CD’s they own onto their iPods or MP3 players;

Giving schools, universities, libraries more flexibility to use copyright material for non-commercial purposes; and

Helping people with disabilities access copyright material.

As we know, the devil is in the details, which can been seen here (pdf document of the Senate Bill). I’ll be having a read of that & seeing what they’re actually suggesting.

[tags]Copyright, Music, Australia, Politics[/tags]

• An HttpModule that moves ViewState to the bottom
  There are two reasons why it is desirable to do so. The first is for letting search engines see more of your content rather than the big portion of ViewState many sites have. The other is perceived rendering time
• How to get SlickRun to activate with Windows-R
  Replace Start -> Run with slickun
• Web App Design Lesson from Our Coffee Machine
  When you add or remove an interface element in a web page, you have to ask yourself, “What percent of the time do people use this element?”
• The Best Worst Ads Part 3 from 1UP.com
  1UP picks the worst gaming ads
• KoTOR franchise to continue, says LucasArts
  Sweet. These were some of the best Starwars games to come out recently

ZDNet is reporting that the NSW state government is promising free Wi-Fi for major CBD areas around the state. This is great, and what’s even better is that Penrith is included on the list! The report has just come out, no details yet, and we all know what political promises are worth. But still, this is at least a sign that the Australian governments are starting to see the benefit of new technology.

The NSW state government will in early 2007 go shopping for suppliers to establish “universal coverage” of free Wi-Fi in Sydney’s central business district, in addition to the suburbs of Parramatta, Penrith and Liverpool and outlying cities Newcastle, Wollongong and Gosford.

The report in the Australian IT also mentions some other policies that seem promising:

Mr Iemma also announced the government would set up an Innovation Council and secretariat to look at ways of improving the innovation capacity of buyers in key industry sectors.

The industry sectors are logistics and transaction services, financial services, entertainment, design and media, manufacturing and resources.

Nice to see a bit of investment in innovation. I’m tired of Australians inventing great stuff, only to have the US actually implement it.

Update: Some more details come to light

The three-year plan, announced by NSW premier Morris Iemma today, will use existing service suppliers to provide free wireless internet coverage in the main business districts of Sydney and North Sydney, Parramatta, Liverpool, Newcastle, Wollongong and Gosford.

…

It was likely that a “basic”, download-restricted service, possibly supported by advertising, would be provided for free, with higher speeds and greater download allowances available to paying customers, a spokesman for NSW Commerce Minister John Della Bosca said.

Not sure how the advertising would work? What are they going to do, force you to use their special browser that has built-in banner ads? Or do a http rewrite at the gateway and plaster ads all over the pages you look at?

[tags]Australia, Wireless, Internet, Politics[/tags]

Wondering what your home is worth, Domain has launched a new feature called My Home, where you can enter your address & see what houses around you have sold for.

They’re using the Google Maps API to bring up a map of the surrounding region with markers showing the recent sales (sourced from Home Price Guide) with details and prices given. You can also get detailed reports on suburbs (here’s the one for Penrith), with price trends, real estate agent lists and demographics. Handy info for when you’re looking for a new place.

Disclosure: Domain is a Fairfax Digital company, who I work for.

[tags]Domain, Real Estate, Housing, Australia[/tags]

I’m pretty happy with Microsoft’s Live Writer program, I’ve found it to be a surprisingly powerful & flexible blogging client, despite Chris Pirillo panning it. While it has all the usual WYSIWYG bells & whistles, the best part about it is the fact that they’ve provided an open API to allow plugin development. This is great, and there’s a few really handy ones already written, Insert Code & Multiple Tags, which is part of the Windows Live Writer Plugins project on Codeplex. There’s a list of plugins on the Windows Live Gallery & on Codeplex. There’s also the Windows Live Writer Plugins blog, which has a lot of great content on how to use Live Writer.

So I’ve written up a plugin to insert bible verses into Live Writer.  It’s utilising the excelent ESV web service. It works so well for the Verse of the Day Wordpress plugin, so why break a trend? Actually, I’d very much like to add other versions to this plugin, but it’s difficult to find decent bible APIs, which is a great pity. If anyone knows of any other publishers providing a web service interface to their text, please drop a comment my way. I’ve designed this plugin to accommodate multiple bible versions, it’s just turned off in this release because there’s only one there!

You can download the installer program from here, but all it does is drop one file into the Live Writer plugins folder, so you can skip the installer and just grab this zip file and extract the plugin file into c:\Program Files\Windows Live Writer\plugins (assuming that’s where you installed Live Writer).

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I sometimes need to remove all intermediate & resulting build files from a Visual Studio solution, either due to version conflicts or because of permissions issues. Powershell just made that job a whole lot easier.

Here’s the command to remove all obj & bin folders from a path (assuming you’re in the path now):

Get-ChildItem .\ -include bin,obj -Recurse | foreach ($_) { remove-item $_.fullname -Force -Recurse }

If you’re not in the correct folder just replace .\ with the full or relative path. You’ll still need to close down Visual Studio first, the -Force switch will override permission failures, but not process locks.

Note: this does a forced delete without prompting for confirmation, so you’d better be really sure you want it all gone. I highly recommend tacking a -WhatIf after the last -Recurse to do a dry run first to see what will be deleted, i.e.:

Get-ChildItem .\ -include bin,obj -Recurse | foreach ($_) { remove-item $_.fullname -Force -Recurse -WhatIf }

YMMV, but this has saved me much annoyance. If you know of any other handy scripts, drop them in a comment. Share the love!