Caught a great edition of Media Watch the other night, one of the few examples of Journalism left on our televisions.

I was somewhat taken aback last week by reports from the states about the Bush regime’s use of “Video News Releases”, that is, state-sponsored propaganda. How foolish of me to expect any better.

At the time I thought it would only be a matter of time until we saw similar practices catching on here. That’s where Media Watch comes in.

It turns out that Launceston’s Examiner has taken to publishing Gunn’s Limited propaganda as if it were journalistic content. To be fair they originally published the 40 pages of Gunn’s propaganda marked as an “advertising feature”.

A few weeks later an announcement was made as to the location of a new Gunn’s pulp mill being built. As part of their headline story on the issue the Examiner republished a number of Gunn’s “stories” with only the following note:

“Information on these four pages provided by the State government”

Who said “government of the people by the parties for the corporations” ? Spot on.

I am a member of the Wilderness Society, I once had long hair and I ride a bike.

Just to foster good relations between Python and Perl devotees, here is recursive directory creation in a sane language:

import os
os.makedirs('line/noise')

Assuming for some reason you wanted to write it yourself, it’d probably look like this:

import os, os.path

def recursive_make_dir(path):
    tmp = ''
    for part in path.split(os.path.sep):
        tmp = os.path.join(tmp, part)
        if not os.path.isdir(tmp):
            os.mkdir(tmp)

To be fair that’s not a lot simpler than Mikal’s original, but then there’s always Jeremy flying the flag for unmaintainable code (and even he got it wrong the first time).

Update: Jeremy thinks there’s a bug in my code because I don’t handle consecutive slashes. But I do, the code still works, it will just check for the same directory twice. Adding extra code to handle it would be reasonably simple, but unless you’re doing NFS over UUCP over SMS the performance gain is going to be very marginal and muddies the code, I’d leave it as it is.

Not to mention that the Python will work on Windows, Linux & MacOS. Errors? You’ll get an exception which you can catch or not.

And if you don’t believe me there’s always the folks at Google.

Went for a stroll round Ainslie the other day, and took some random shots, just for the fun of it.

Some are of houses I liked, some I didn’t like, and a few sunset shots.

View the photos »

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Mythbusters dude

Worthy of John or George.

I stumbled across this blog the other day, by way of something.

It has an interesting mix of analysis and direct quotation, an unusual style of writing.

The last few days his posts have been focused on the Terri Schiavo case, with some interesting insight into the motivations of some of the players in that debacle. (Ars Technica have also done a good writeup.)

[Update: it gets better.]

I particularly liked this piece on the developments in Kyrgyzstan and America’s role, or lack thereof.

I promised Alli I’d put up some photos of the house looking nice, so here they are. These are from a few weeks ago (when I wasn’t sick!) when we thought we were having an inspection. As it turned out we never had the inspection, the agent forgot, but at least the house got cleaned up.

View the photos »

There’s a manky bug in QT 3.3.3 that causes my mailer to convert tabs to spaces. Needless to say that’s a little annoying. It’s fixed in QT 3.3.4.

I got sick of waiting for the official 3.3.4 Debian packages so I rolled my own. These aren’t Debian Packages®™, they’re packages for debian, or in other words they work for me and other than that I wouldn’t know.

Get ‘em for x86 here.

ps. Before you say anything, my sources tell me this bug doesn’t affect fvwm so you’re safe.

I was at Uni the last time Voluntary Student Unionism was on the Senate’s table, and I protested against it. I’d do the same again.

Firstly let’s clarify that Student Unions are not “Unions”, they are student bodies. They provide students with cheap food, drinks, entertainment, fitness facilities, health services, representation within the University bureaucracy, and they help make Universities centres of culture in a way that the local TAFE never is. The proper term for the fees should be GSF, General Services Fees.

Martin makes the analogy to Tax, although I would argue that it isn’t an analogy, but that the GSF are the equivalent of taxation on University campuses.

I also think that it’s absolutely valid for those fees to go to clubs and societies, especially sporting clubs.

As usual I disagree with Chris, =D. The reason Student Unions complain about HECS and not the GSF is because the sums involved are vastly different. HECS fees can be anywhere up to $10,000 a year, whereas the GSF in my time was about $200 and as far as I’m aware hasn’t increased significantly.

I also can’t agree with Chris’ argument that if the services provided thanks to the GSF are sufficiently good, people will pay for them voluntarily, that’s just daft. Isn’t us lefties who are supposed to be all naïve about the world?! Come on, if people don’t have to pay for things they won’t, you might get 1% of people paying out of altruism but that’s not going to work.

At the end of the day the attack on VSU, and Universities in general, simply comes down to a belief within the government that Universities are a breeding ground for Liberal thought. And that is something to stamped out.

Just a brief note to all my fans, despite the Lyme’s best efforts I’m still breathing.

I’ve been laid up in bed, and on the couch, most of the week, but am back at work today, feeling a bit better. Still quite fatigued, easily puffed and generally not very energetic. But on the mend.

I’ve got a patch I went to get sorted, tested and out the door before it’s too late for 2.6.12, so I’m keen to get back on the wagon. At the same time I’ve still got probably a fortnight’s antibiotics ahead of me and plenty of bacteria to kill, so I might work from home a bit here and there to help keep my energy up.

So it seems that one of the Ticks I brought back from the coast a fortnight ago was carrying Lyme disease and has now kindly donated it to me.

Lyme disease is a bacterial infection treated with antibiotics, I’m currently taking Doxycycline for it. Out on the net there seems to be some disagreement as to whether it can be eradicated with antibiotics, some doctors believe it may be able to hibernate (my word) and cause recurring infections. Let’s hope not.

Symptoms are fairly varied and vague, something that has lead to Lyme being mis-disagnosed as chronic fatigue, MS and Rheumatoid arthritis. Currently I’m experiencing a non-descript rash (not Bull’s-eye), aches and pains, and extreme fatigue.

Perhaps interestingly I only went to the doctor after reading about Ticks and Tick-borne infections on Wikipedia, so thanks to the folks at Wikipedia.

No thanks to the folks at ebay (and Google pull your head in!):

Lyme Disease Tick

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