Sunday 30th saw a fantastic march of undead Zombies through Sydney, starting at Town Hall and lurching its was to Circular Quay. It was great fun, and stupified many Sydney locals and tourists.
Harrah.
Some event pictures will be up when I can grab them off my housemate.
pictures via Tegan’s flickr set.
The BBC, amongst many other sources, reports that three new security holes have been found in Internet Explorer. For those of you out there surfing using IE, here is my strongest recommendation: Get Firefox!*
On top of the security benefits Firefox is faster, and comes with a bunch of features that really improve one’s browsing experience such as tabs and Livebookmarks for RSS sources.
Mozilla [Firefox] has bugs to (sic). Lots of them. The difference, however is the time it takes to patch them.
…This vulnerability is the perfect example: MS was notified about this on 13/02/2006, 40 days ago. They had all the opportunity to fix it in this month’s security patch, but thy did not. So the patch will come no earlier than 2 months after discovery - that’s a huge window of exposure. (Stellian commenting on Slashdot)
Microsoft obviously doesn’t think that the two holes allowing full-hijacking of a computer are serious enough to deviate from their regular second-Tuesday-of-every-month patch release, saying that they would only consider releasing earlier if the “threat grew significantly”.
and I love this typically useless piece of advice:
To avoid falling victim, Microsoft urged users to avoid websites they did not trust … (BBC Article)
I think if we want to seriously comply with Microsoft’s suggestion, we might as well unplug our broadband now. How about this little nugget of wisdom: Avoid using browsers you do not trust.
* I realise that some of you may be forced by company policy to use IE, and in this case I would urge you to bring up the intelligence of such a policy with whoever is responsible. Why waste workers’ time and their computer processor power on the plethora of spyware, adware and malware that typically accompanies Internet Explorer use?
Those of you not in Australia may not be aware of this little tidbit of information: Australia has delayed the standard hour shift for daylight savings in order to accommodate the Commonwealth games.
It took me and a friend about five minutes to come up with a whole heap of scenarios where confusion and problems would arise from this. Why did this appear to be a good idea? There must be a sea of critical business logic that relies on predictable time changes.
The politics of this decision seem to be based on the discourse of the Commonwealth games as an important construction of nationalism for Australians;
Swinburne University’s senior lecturer in media, John Schwartz, said local coverage of the Commonwealth Games had been ridiculously nationalistic. International athletes were marginalised and those stepping up to collect their medals are just cut off. (Junkforcode)
This is something I find difficult to endure, along with the pervasiveness and power of military legend of the ANZACS. Colonial Australia is a very young nation, and seems to feel the need to concretely strengthen patriotism and nationalism of her people.
Mark Ronson has created a fantastic cover of Radiohead’s “Just” from “The Bends”, treated to a funky horns section and fun London graffiti-montage video.
I’ve linked to the high quality Quicktime movie; more formats and more info can be found from the contactmusic.com page.
Via USATODAY.com:
A twelve-year-old boy visiting the Detroit Institute of Arts with his school has stuck a piece of gum to a $1.5m abstract painting.
The gum did not bind to the fibre of the painting (”The Bay” by Helen Frankenthaler), and the museum’s conservation department expects that after the appropriate chemical treatment the painting will be fine.
It is funny to see this sort of thing going on, and how people react to it. In a very real sense, the boy was entering into a discourse with the painting. I have a friend who due to his healthy scepticism of most modern art is constantly urged to subvert it. My gut feeling is that someones creative work should be respected. Not out of a social-relativism that judges all things as equally valid/good, but because it supposedly carries a great deal of value to whomever produced it.
I am extremely confident that this story would not have been run if the painting was valued at a more modest price. This seems to suggest that the unconsidered engagement of the school boy with the painting was apt: to the journo the story is implicitly about the high value and not about a simple act of vandalism.
Via BBC:
Allied Press has obtained video and transcripts of President Bush receiving “very strong warnings” on the safety of New Orleans’ levees against hurricane Katrina. These warnings, given to the President by Michael Brown the chief emergency response official on the eve of Katrina’s landfall, stated there was a chance the levees would be broken. The president apparently responded that “We are fully prepared”.
The video is damning given that four days after the storm Bush commented: “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.”
I’ve just migrated to a brand new, cheap, fast Aussie server. The company is MD Web hosting, and they are very reasonably priced and have a full compliment of useful tools and features. Compared to the hosting that came with my Namesecure domain names, this is like being in a candy store. Here’s some immediate improvements:
If you notice any problems with the site, please shout out! (Webmaster AT neonascent DOT net) Thankyou!
I have an idea. The system works like this:
“A man has an idea. The idea attracts others, like-minded. The idea expands…”
I like my idea - I think it’s rad. I want it to expand.
Basically, imagine an two protagonists whose day-to-day lives are represented by many many different people, in many-many different ways. In the same way as some stories and protagonists are used as building blocks for creative endevours, a loose central narrative will be woven by the threads of each contributor. Interested? Check out http://www.neonascent.net/CarrieVostok for a bit more info.
At the moment I’m looking for interested and helpful friends to help build up a little collection of example material, that can go on the site and give the masses something to chew on. Please contact me if you want to help!
Well, you may notice that you are no longer at Much Mojo. The blog will still be reachable through all the old avenues, and now www.neonascent.com .org and .net all point to this too. Muchmojo is a little silly, and neonascent is a domain name appropriate for both online art portfolio, IT consulting, and the promised online gallery.
Hope you enjoy it. It’s about time for more regular posts! 
Quickly, here are two articles that seem to foreshadow the future of “anti-terrorist”* government activity.
However, with regards to the effectiveness of this surveilance on stopping terrorism, it must also be noted that we are the authors of our own trail of information. With some knowledge of the nature of information systems, we can choose to influence or confound the data-mining process. The most likely people to do this will be resourceful and sophisticated subversive groups; the London bombers all had completely clean histories. Aside: Of course for control of political subversion, and in conjunction with the anti-sedition law of Australia, this sort of thing is quite useful at finding and charging incisively critical individuals.
* I don’t think that it would be unfair to make “anti-terrorist” synonymous with “invasive, totalitarian”, although I’m sure there is a huge slice of the world that is still coerced by such rhetorical discourse.