Jimmy's weblog

A day or two after Apple celebrates selling its 500,000,000th song, it seems appropriate to ask why Australia is yet to ? According to the Bulletin Magazine, it’s Sony’s fault.
A head-butting exercise between two digital-age mastodons is blocking Australians from getting their own iTunes Music Store. The iTMS, which has sold close to half [...]

This morning The Age treats us to yet another pirated software scare campaign, this time on behalf of game developers.
Buying and selling pirated games attracts penalties of between two and five years in prison, and a fine of up to $55,000. Despite the penalties, games are being pirated in Australia at a rate approaching one [...]

Well, they’re not really paying me - in fact I’m paying them - but I’d like to put in a good word for the hosts of this site.
Up until a week ago I’d been running a hosting reseller business through United Hosting. For $US44 per month I had access to 50 domains, 50GB of diskspace [...]

Mosque, Istanbul

City view, Istanbul

Australian grave, Gallipoli

World War I memorial, Gallipoli

Australian and New Zealand graves, Gallipoli

Primus Telecom today announced the release of their new high-speed ADSL broadband plans. Up to four times faster than the current maximum speed, the plans are priced extremely competitively: $29.95 per month for the 400MB plan and $49.95 per month for 12GB. Speeds range from a minimum of 2Mb/s to a maximum of [...]

With the final release of Firefox 1.0, it’s time to talk about some of the options available for increasing web browsing performance. Firefox makes a number of configuration options available via menus but the majority are hidden away from immediate view. Typing “about:config” in to the address bar will list them all and allow [...]

In a curious campaign twist, voters from outside the United States have been blocked from the official Bush-Cheney 2004 website. Starting around midnight Monday (US time), visitors to www.georgewbush.com and its aliases, including www.bushcheney2004.com, have seen their access screened based on the geographical location of their IP address. Those outside the US have been [...]

It’s time to show some financial support for the Spread Firefox campaign. After easily reaching their target of one million web browser downloads in ten days, the SF team would now like to place a full page ad in the New York Times announcing the release of Firefox 1.0.
To do this, the are looking [...]

“We’re big believers in interoperability.”
Guess who? Linus Torvalds, Steve Jobs, Ghandi?
Nope, it’s Bill Gates.

Just back from listening to a two-hour talk by Dr Richard Stallman on the danger of software patents. RMS, as he is more commonly known, is one of the fathers of the Free Software Foundation and author of many of the GNU tools including the Emacs editor.
Below is my summary of his talk. [...]