December 2nd, 2009 by Cadet

A Mount Gambier woman recently diagnosed with breast cancer was turned away from the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Adelaide yesterday after it was found she had no insurance. The woman, who had made the appointment to have the tumours removed after the initial diagnosis, had driven 5 hours only to be told that she was ‘jumping the queue’ and that another appointment would have to be made. The receptionist told her it was assumed that she would have private health cover.

This only weeks since Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had pronounced much satisfaction with South Australia’s rural health system after visiting Murray Bridge for a Rural Health Summit .

October 20th, 2009 by Cadet

I’m disappointed. I received a couple of emails from a reputable computer society (based entirely of computing professionals) and they were HTML only …. Why would that bother me, you ask? Ok, seeing as you ask, I’ll tell you:

Allowing an email client to render html emails opens up security issues such as ‘web-bugs’ – online images that when fetched (automatically in many clients) provide the sender (potentially a spammer or botnet) of the email nice info such as your IP address, your OS, and that the email address is valid.

Now, I’m not saying that this computer society is using dastardly tactics such as webugs to keep tabs on their readership – they are a good bunch of folks. However, encouraging (or in this case demanding) that email clients have html enabled to view their emails is borderline irresponsible. We computer professionals ought to be encouraging the use of text-only emails and the permanent disarmament of html emails. Numerous security exploits in all the major windows email clients have shown how dangerous this kind of ‘intelligent scripting’ can be.

The fellow behind nthelp.com has setup a page for testing whether you are vulnerable.
http://www.nthelp.com/OEtest/oe.htm

Botnet, E-mail, E-mail spam, HTML, HTML e-mail, Spam, Spamming

September 30th, 2009 by Cadet

“Can I have a holder-upper please?”. The moment the words left my mouth I regretted it, and looked back with longing to the days when I was rather fond of communicating multisyllabicly. Today, the thing that startled the most is that the girl in the drive-thru understood what I wanted, in spite of the gibberish I was mouthing. Had I actually used some multisyllabic synonym I think the cupholder would not have been so forthcoming, sad to say. We all need to look to improving our vocabularies, and I can’t think of a more socially responsible way of doing it than playing the very addictive game at www.freerice.com, where they donate 10grains of rice through the UN World Food Program for every answer you get right. Go on… You know you want to.

September 27th, 2009 by Cadet

Mount Gambier residents often find themselves shocked and amazed by the numbers of people within the state who don’t know where it is. Some believe it to be in the Hills of Adelaide, 420km to the NorthWest of its true location, others in the Riverland district, 500km to the North. Doctors receptionists wanting to know if you can get to an appointment within the next 30minutes are just the tip of a very disappointing iceberg. So, to remedy this in some small part, I have written a small article Where Is Mount Gambier? with map.

September 21st, 2009 by Cadet

Well, here I was about to download the totally brilliant Google Sketchup – a 3D design masterpiece if ever there was one, only to find that it’s not available for Linux. This is a crying shame, I was most impressed with it when I saw it at the Limestone Coast Software Freedom Day, but there’s o way I’m going to install windows just to play with it. C’mon Google, show us the stuff I know you’re made of and release a Linux version soonest. Please.

SketchUp