Zaf’s Blog

Double Trouble

8-8-08, yes its the opening of the games, but thats not whats important! Its double-trouble, the dual release of Tee Morris’s The Case of the Pitcher’s Pendant (a Billibub Baddings novel) and Philippa Ballantine’s Digital Magic.

Though with the wackyness of timezones, the official purchase time is 8am Pacific, which is 3am Saturday (9-8-08) New Zealand. So if you do happen to read this in time and decide to buy, any time after 3am Saturday New Zealand time is good. (Yes you can apparently do it on Saturday morning, but I think those people are slackers. Its 3am or bust for me)

Of significant note is that Philippa Ballantine is New Zealands only podcast novelist. So support local talent, and buy her book.

I think its high time for MP Winston Peters to take a bit of his own advice and step down. In his own words “We have to have some accountability right now. It’s a case of put up or shut up.”

Last night Mr Peters admitted that his party had in fact received a huge donation from billionare Owen Glenn. Mr Peters  had repeatidly denied these all allegations, to the point where he called for a public appology and resignation of the editor and political editor of the NZ Herald.

Now its time for Mr Peters to “put up“.  He certainly can’t seem to shut up.

I have a dead pixel on my LCD (boo hoo!), but its location is at the top right of my screen, its located precisely such that the google search box on the location bar in Firefox, when maximized (Firefox’s usual state), sits right above the ‘e’ in google written in the Google search box. When I read it, it reads Googlé. Thus every time I read it, I think I’ve somehow started my browser in French mode or something

I’d take a screenshot and show you all, but, well….. (For the slow ones out there, think about it for a minute, you’ll get it).

Oh, and whilst I’m posting again, I noticed that google has an ipv6 version. I don’t know how long its been around for, but I’m pretty sure its new within the last 6 months. Nothing special to it, except its ipv6. Hopefully they’ll consider publishing AAAA records for all their domains.

The news is out that Service Pack 3 for Windows XP includes a change in Windows’ UPnP core. This change results in some differences in the UPnP packets it sends. The issue however is that some routers, which have implemented the bare minimums of the UPnP protocol, and have implemented it poorly, crash when receiving these UPnP Packets.

Whilst this is news, why is it news here?

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m getting sick of hearing of companies that are deliberately misleading consumers, sometimes to dangerous results, and getting away with it. When a company is caught, they issue an immediate appology, and move on, all is forgiven. The government agencies responsible for protecting consumers issue a press release, and consider the matter closed. “We caught them, they’re sorry they lied to all of you lot, and they promise not to do it again”. Its getting tiresome.

The latest is the Sunscreen debacle. Numerous companies have been advertising their products as having “all day protection”, stating that one application will protect you from sun burn and skin cancer for the entire day. Consumers have, until now, been left to discover the hard way that that is very very wrong.

Even the Commerce Comission itself said that this was unacceptable:

Commission chairwoman Paula Rebstock said “Consumers should not have to find out the hard way, through sunburn and skin damage, that a sunscreen doesn’t provide the protection claimed. The onus is on manufacturers and distributors to ensure the claims made on their products about SPF are accurate.”

But the commerce commission congratulated them on being caught

Commission chairwoman Paula Rebstock said she was very pleased the companies had responded in a responsible manner.

Consider the consequence of what these companies have done: They have lied to consumers, knowingly and willfully, and caused an untold and impossible to calculate number of sunburns, which as we all know from the recent advertising campaign, leads to skin cancer later in life.