Congratulations to comrade Rudd & the ALP on the inspired move of declaring themselves the winner of their own tender without even bidding. I’m sure that will teach pesky ISP’s who dare to stand up for their customers or challenge your infinite wisdom about Internet censorship. Now you have the perfect way to filter out all those unwanted nasties including:

• illegal material
• child porn
• pro-Liberal websites
• anything suggesting that Kevin ever claimed to be an economic conservative

Feel free to flame me if you disagree.

We’ve just cancelled the April SydPHP Group meeting. For more information check out http://www.sydphp.org/

I don’t know who made the decision to go after the freeview parody for copyright infringement but I’m guessing that right now they wish they could undo that decision. I’m pretty sure they were hoping to limit the number of people who saw the parody but instead they only seem to have encouraged people to watch it.

The March Sydney PHP Group meeting is on tonight. Once again it will be hosted by Mobile Messenger. If you’re planning to attend then meeting in the foyer downstairs (17 York St) from 6.20

The first meeting of the Sydney PHP Group for 2009 will be at 6pm on Thursday, February 5. We have a new venue above Wynyard station and you need to RSVP using Upcoming. This month I’ll be speaking about faster web applications using message queues.

Sending an email to one or two people from a contact form is pretty simple but what happens when sending an email means 5,000 of your closest friends? Richard will cover how some of the largest websites provide fast response times by off-loading intensive, non-critical jobs to back end processes.

After much pain I found this great article about how to connect to a Windows VPN from Ubunto 8.10. Thanks Dean!!

About a year ago I purchased a Lenovo laptop. Being a Linux user I installed Linux on it and went along happily until a few months back when I installed the 64 bit version of Ubuntu. Suddenly I felt like a second class citizen. It’s bad enough that some software barely supports Linux but to suddenly have many applications completely unavailable because they’re 32 bit only was too much.

After putting up with this for about a month I decided that I need to switch. My choices were 32 bit Linux or Vista (which the system came with). During the last week I decided I would give Vista a try. The long weekend seemed like the perfect time to make the switch.

Sadly Lenovo don’t provide a restore CD or DVD instead using a protected recovery partition which I had been careful to keep. After starting my laptop I pressed the ThinkVantage button to start the recover process. I selected a complete factory restore using the wizard only to be told that it could not restore my system at the very end. The problems seems to have been caused because it could not find the Windows partition it was expecting.

Personally I always found the idea of a recovery partition to be dangerous at best. What if my hard drive fails? In that situation the last thing I would want to do is fork over more money to Microsoft for an operating system I already owned.

The end result is that I’m still running Ubuntu (the 32 bit version). Most of the applications I require are available again but I’m still without the latest features that Windows user have had for years.

LENOVO YOU SUCK!!

I see James Polley posted about City Rail once again changing how they measure something to make their figure look better instead of solving the problem. I’d like to add last week to the list of complaints. Between 29 December and 2 January (4 working days for me) I was force to put up with City Rail running trains to a Saturday timetable while still feeling they should charge me a peak hour rail fare. If you want to operate an off peak service then try charging for it.

With 16,000 unread emails in my inbox it might be time to declare email bankruptcy…

There’s a cheap bookshop at the end of the Devonshire tunnel near Central station. They seem to specialise in books that are close to end of life (i.e. the book covers the previous version of … or the title just didn’t sell well). A couple of guys from work went there at lunch to get some books. The store rarely has books I’m after so I decided to skip the trip. After seeing what they returned with and how much paid I stopped in on the way home and picked up the following Apress titles:

• Beginning Java SE 6 Platform
• Pro Apache Struts with Ajax
• The Definitive Guide to Grails
• Begining EJB 3 Application Development
• Begining JBoss Seam
• Begining J2ME Platform

Total cost: < $40

I’m still trying to decide exactly which Java framework I’m going to use but at these prices I thought I’d pick up the books for all the frameworks they had. It’s a shame they didn’t have anything about Spring and that Theo got the last one about Hibernate.