Forgive the non Web- or technology-based post, but the current climate change debate has really made me angry.

First of all, I have no problems with people having their own views and ideas and I’m not about to suggest some sort of dictatorship where everyone is told what to think (even if the views of some are completely ridiculous). I do, however, have a huge problem with the logic used by many climate change skeptics out there.

The logic of the skeptics seems to be that climate change is not caused by humans, or it doesn’t even exist, so therefore we don’t need to do anything about pollution. If we’re not causing climate change then there’s apparently no reason to stop pumping out disgusting amounts of carbon dioxide and other fun chemicals into the atmosphere.

Climate change should not even be part of the debate here. We should only be considering what the state of our planet will be in the near future. I’d like to breathe air in fifty years time rather than yellow smog.

I recently decided to recode a Web site I had developed several years ago to make it cleaner and easier to modify. The design involved lots of rounded corners and I had used images for some of the corners and CSS hacks for others. These methods did the job but made the markup somewhat bloated and ugly, and the many images also increased the page download time.

CSS to the rescue! I decided to make use of the CSS3 border-radius property which allows for rounded corners without any images or extra HTML. CSS3 hasn’t been properly implemented yet, however the border-radius effect can be achieved in Gecko, Webkit and KHTML-based browsers using -moz-border-radius, -webkit-border-radius and -khtml-border-radius respectively. Opera’s Presto rendering engine had a similar property but this has unfortunately been removed. Opera’s market share (around 2%) is small enough that I can feel okay ignoring it until the developers choose to bring back the border-radius property. Internet Explorer, however, has a majority market share and predictably has no support for border-radius nor an equivalent proprietary property.

One of many solutions I found to Internet Explorer’s disability was a JavaScript solution, DD_roundies, by Drew Diller. Using conditional comments I included the reasonably small 9kb js file in my HTML source only for Internet Explorer users and added a rule for each ID or class that I wanted to have rounded corners for. Now when I load up my page in either IE 6, 7 or 8, the borders of the appropriate divs are as rounded as they are in Firefox.

It seems the OFLC has refused classification for Left 4 Dead 2. I agree with this decision: clearly anyone who plays this game will feel the urge to grab the nearest shotgun and blow the heads off a few zombies.

This is further proof that our country is being run by a bunch of technologically-ignorant morons. Given the current proposals of Internet filtering and the complete lack of progress and planning of the National Broadband network we really didn’t need more evidence to support this.

So now instead of legally purchasing this game on Steam I will be forced to pirate it. If the Government thinks these outdated classification laws are protecting anyone they are seriously misinformed.

Thanks Michael Atkinson.

A few months ago, despite not being the biggest Apple fan in the world, I bought an iPhone. Once again Apple had created something unique and I decided I had to have one. Being my first Apple product I was pretty impressed. Unfortunately my phone had a screen issue out of the box, but five minutes on the phone to Apple and I was given a coupon to take to the post office to get it sent back for free. A week later I received a brand new iPhone (not a refurbished model) which was pretty good considering postage times from Adelaide to Sydney.

The iPhone itself is amazing. The touch screen is intuitive and easy to use and the App store is fantastic, there are so many different apps that are available for free (or for around a dollar or two, encouraging impulse buying).

But it’s Apple’s closed off nature that really lets down the iPhone. It didn’t take me long to jailbreak my phone, opening the door to additions like the awesomely useful SBSettings, the 5 icon dock, battery percentage indicator (I have the 3G model) and a whole bunch of other useful apps not available through official Apple channels. I will say this now: if you have an iPhone and it’s not jailbroken, do it now. You’ll be asking yourself why you didn’t do it sooner.

The biggest annoyance I’ve had so far with the restricted nature of Apps has been a usage meter I bought (paid app, not free, hence my anger over this issue). This particular App allows me to keep track of my mobile phone credit usage and home Internet download usage. I use this app at least once every two days. Unfortunately a couple of weeks back, Virgin Mobile Australia decided to redo their Web site and made changes to their authentication system. So now my usage app can no longer log into their site to get my mobile phone usage. The developer of the usage app, who is a legend for support, fixed the issue later that same day, but due to Apple’s infuriatingly slow approval process the update has yet to make an appearance in the App store, over two weeks later. If Apple must insist on approving all applications they will need to hire a hell of a lot more staff to do it, and should implement some sort of fast track program for application updates.

The second annoyance came about when I wanted to plug my iPhone into the TV. I went to the Apple Web site where they wanted $60 for a composite cable. That’s right, $60 for fifty cents worth of cable. “Screw that”, I thought, and went to have a look on eBay where I found generic iPhone-compatible composite cables for $10 with free postage. Unfortunately these listings have a small disclaimer: “will not work with iPhone firmware 3.0″. It seems that Apple has started including authentication chips in their cables, so if you plug a cable into an iPhone that doesn’t have one of these chips it will not work. These sort of business practices should be illegal and pretty much highlight Apple’s success: suck people into buying a really cool new toy and then squeeze more money out of them by charging ridiculous prices for accessories without allowing for competition.

Overall I am really happy with the iPhone and the above experiences have not made me rule out buying an iPhone again. Before I become an Apple “fanboy”, however, Apple are going to need to improve their business practices. But I don’t see that happening any time soon.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or outside Australia) you’re likely well aware of the Australian Government’s plan to censor the Web. They want to force a compulsory ISP-side filter on every Australian in the name of the often used “won’t someone think of the children!” argument.

There are two ways in which they are protecting children by implementing a Web filter. The first is by blocking access to child pornography, the second is by preventing children from accidentally stumbling across inappropriate material.

Blocking access to child pornography

Simply put this is not possible. As surprising as this may sound, there is no official paedophile Web site out there. You can’t download images of child pornography by Googling “child porn” or going to childporn.com. All a Web filter is going to do is block access to certain Web sites, but what if the offending material isn’t on a Web site? The Web makes up only part of the Internet, there are dozens of other ways to transmit and share images. FTP, DCC via IRC and BitTorrent are just a few examples. Even if there were some inappropriate Web sites that should be blocked, bypassing any Web filter is insanely easy. Using a proxy, an SSH tunnel or an encrypted connection are all relatively easy ways to accomplish this.

Preventing children from accidentally stumbling across inappropriate material

Again, this sounds like a perfectly valid reason for implementing a Web filter. But why should the Web be filtered for every single Australian just to prevent kids from stumbling across something that they shouldn’t see? Surely an opt-in ISP-side filter, or a client-side filter installed by concerned parents, would accomplish this. Why doesn’t the Government simply require all ISPs to offer a free content filter for those who request it? And what ever happened to good old parental supervision? If you’re worried that your kids may, accidentally or not, stumble across something that’s inappropriate, keep an eye on them when they’re surfing. Put the family computer in an open location. Most kids are likely more technologically literate than their parents anyway, so bypassing the filter if they choose isn’t likely to be an issue: I remember using a proxy to bypass the draconian filters in high school when I was thirteen.

Web filters are not going to solve any problems and anyone who thinks they will are kidding themselves and have absolutely no idea how the Internet or World Wide Web work. So please, Misters Rudd and Conroy, abandon this pointless plan to filter my Web, I will just bypass it out of principle anyway.