Facebook Ad for Conroy Cartoon T-Shirts Facebook Page

Facebook Ad for Conroy Cartoon T-Shirts Shop website

 
The Ad on the left was targeted at All Australians and produced one click-through in 24 hours.  The Ad on the right was targeted at Australians aged 18 to 40.  It burnt through my daily advertising budget in about 40 minutes.

Joel Pobar : Visualisations of myschool.edu.au data

Joel Pobar will briefly show us how he used F# to relate disparate datasets and create his amazing visualisations of myschool.edu.au data.

Robert Crago, Revelation Computing :
An Introduction to WPF 3D

Robert Crago is a long-standing QMSDNUG member and freelance developer here in Brisbane.  Robert has been working with WPF since mid 2008.  WPF is finding steadily-increasing use in development projects where the UI is important and supports a complete 3D engine “out of the box”.  To his knowledge the 3D aspects of WPF have not yet been explored at an MSDN meeting here in Brisbane.

This talk will cover both the concepts and code you need to get started with 3D in WPF.

1. What you can do in 3D
2. 3D basics using Expression Blend
3. A simple 3D example without writing code
4. Making a scene
5. Using 3D in Line of Business apps
6. Applying 3D to a real world example

RSVP:
All welcome.  Bring your colleagues.
An early rsvp by email to mike@fitzsimon.com.au will help with planning.

A Deloitte analyst, Damien Tampling, has been reported by ARNnet as predicting the Government’s controversial ISP filter will have minimal long-term effect on Australian businesses.

I think there’s an important factor that Mr Tampling has missed altogether.

It has become clear over the past few months that Google is now placing a higher importance on “Page Load Speed” when calculating Page Rank – the all-important score that gets my business near the top of page 1 of Google search results.

My Australian website, hosted in Australia, will be crawled by the googlebot through an Australian ISP.  Senator Conroy says it will load “a blink of an eye” slower, but this is an eternity to the googlebot.  My page rank will then be lower than that of a competing US, UK or NZ company.  I and other Australian companies will forever be at a commercial disadvantage because of the filter.

As I see it, ISP Filter -> Slower Page Loads -> Lower Google Page Rank -> Commercial disadvantage for Australian companies.  What do others think?

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See also…

• Mandatory ISP Filter Mind Map to see where this fits in with all the other arguments against Senator Conroy’s censorship scheme.
• www.stopinternetcensorship.org, particularly the Action Page where there are 5 things you can do right now to help stop internet censorship,
• Whirlpool’s knowledge base article on the “Cleanfeed”,
• Sign EFAs Petition now.
• Wear a Conroy Cartoon T-Shirt.
• See my earlier Conroy Cartoon posts.

Mind Map presenting arguments against Senator Conroy’s Mandatory ISP Filter and offering a better solution for Child Cyber-Safety (click to enlarge)

The aim is to enlist this Member’s support for changing Labor’s Child Cyber-Safety policy away from the expensive and ineffective ISP filter and towards in-home filtering and education for parents about their role in ensuring their child’s safety.

Critically Urgent

The need to get this policy changed is now critically urgent as Senator Conroy has announced that legislation will be presented to Parliament in the next few months.

If you think it is helpful, please use the Mind Map to guide your own discussions with friends, relatives, workmates, etc.  Download a copy as

• Hi res png, 144kb, or
• PDF, 50kb

Of course, many technical arguments have been omitted but if you spot any errors, serious omissions or room for improvement, please let me know.

Thanks to Kath (@sleepydumpling) for suggesting that I use the word “PROHIBITION” instead of “CENSORSHIP” when talking to a politician.  Of course some politicians will think Censorship is perfectly reasonable in certain circumstances and the word doesn’t create a negative image for them at all.  On the other hand, Prohibition reminds us all of the bootlegging and other unintended outcomes of banning alcohol in the 1920s.

For further information:

• www.stopinternetcensorship.org, particularly the Action Page where there are 5 things you can do right now to help stop internet censorship,
• Whirlpool’s knowledge base article on the “Cleanfeed”,
• Sign EFAs Petition now.
• Wear a Conroy Cartoon T-Shirt.
• See my earlier Conroy Cartoon posts.

However, there’s also this other niggling question…
Do I trust ALL future governments to NOT misuse the national internet filter infrastructure?

2009: The ACMA is blacklisting an ANTI-abortion website because its images are offensive to children.
2011 (as the filter goes live): We now have the national infrastructure to filter all RC material, including euthanasia and PRO-abortion websites.
2016 (after the revolution): The People’s Republic of Australia will now ‘harmonize’ all references to the Federation Square riot and massacre which, of course, DID NOT HAPPEN.
2021 (after the Jihad): The Islamic Caliphate of Australia will now filter all pro-Christian websites.

Who knows what the future holds?  If a national internet filtering infrastructure is in place, will it be mis-used?  It’s only a matter of time.

What sort of Australia do you want to leave for your children?

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Update
You can now purchase this cartoon on a t-shirt.

Related “Conroy Cartoons”

Phone Senator Conroy

87 Percent

Pervert Conroy?

Yeah, well two can play that game…
Now that his ISP filter clearly won’t protect children, what’s his real motivation for pushing on regardless?

Citizen: Senator Conroy, you know your ineffective ISP filter won’t protect children from internet nasties?
Sen. Conroy: You must be a pervert.
Citizen: You know parents will let their guard down, thinking “The government is doing my job for me.”
Sen. Conroy: You must be a pervert.
Citizen: You know children will be harmed as a result of your ISP filter?
Sen. Conroy: I KNEW you were a pervert.
Citizen: You know it will be a huge waste of our taxes and won’t get one paedophile one meter closer to a courtroom.
Sen. Conroy: Isn’t it GREAT? (Welcome to the pervert club, by the way.)

Of course I don’t really believe that Senator Conroy is a pervert.  But I sure don’t like his “bully boy” tactics.

His real motivation for pushing on regardless is to establish the Western world’s most efficient censorship scheme.  Don’t fall for Conroy’s Con.

The mandatory ISP filter will never be 100% effective.  Our nation will never be able to afford the army of bureaucrats necessary to keep an ACMA “BlackList” up to date enough to protect children, while avoiding the unintended consequences of censorship experienced in other countries.

A better solution is parental supervision, aided if necessary by in-home filtering software targeted at the age-group of the children.

I call upon Prime Minister Rudd to cancel Senator Conroy’s white-elephant censorship scheme once and for all.  Spend the money on the Australian Federal Police and parent education.

———————
Update
You can now purchase this cartoon on a t-shirt.

Related “Conroy Cartoons”

Phone Senator Conroy

87 Percent

Conroy has made a courageous decision to trial and now proceed with ISP filtering of refused classification material.

It is one for which he will receive much hate mail, but one for which he should also be applauded by those who realise what he set out to do which is to protect our children from the very worst, illegal material online.

Mrs Limkin mentions that “an independent body, as opposed to the Government, will determine classification of internet sites.”  She doesn’t seem to notice that the sheer size of the internet means that this approach is doomed to failure.  And children will be immediately at risk.

I submitted the following as a letter to the editor…

Ruth Limkin, please!  Open your eyes.  You have been taken in by Conroy’s Con.

In July 2008, Google’s index of unique URLs hit one trillion and is “increasing by several billion pages per day”^[1].  There is no way our nation will ever afford the army of bureaucrats necessary to protect children by creating a “blacklist” of all the bad stuff.

By supporting Conroy’s solution, you are actually placing children in harm’s way.  Parents will let their guard down, thinking “The government is doing my job for me.”

You are also supporting a huge waste of our taxes on something that won’t get one paedophile one meter closer to a courtroom.

A better solution would be parental supervision, aided where necessary by in-home filtering software targeted at the age group of the children.

Conroy (and our Labor government) is harnessing your, no doubt well-intentioned, aim of “protecting children” to build something far worse than a nanny state. It is censorship.

An Australia with an easily-manipulated censorship scheme in place is not the Australia I want to leave to my children.

—————————————
[1] We knew the web was big…
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html

———————
Update 1 Jan 10:
Good news.  I’ve just had the phone call.  Watch out for this letter in tomorrow’s print edition of the Courier-Mail.

———————
Update 2 Jan 10:
Here it is as published, along with a more technical letter from Jonathan Bendall.

———————
Update 4 Jan 10:
Monday’s Courier-Mail included another letter.  This one from Bill Hely.

———————
For more information, see my earlier posts:

• 87 Percent
• Phone Senator Conroy
• No Censorship after Australia Day
• Federal Government’s Censorship Plan is Dangerous to Children
• Cancer and Colitis victims Condemn Conroy’s Censorship

After all, 5% is the bare minimum — even deposed Liberal Prime Minister John Howard could see that.  I guess a higher target would have galvanised the Liberal-National opposition.

But now, as Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull faces unprecedented challenges to his leadership and his front-bench come out one by one as climate change sceptics, I can see just how clever Kevin Rudd has been.

CPRS = Coalition Party Reduction Scheme

The “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” currently before the Parliament is driving a wedge through the opposition.  Sadly, it has a long way to go before it does anything to actually combat climate change.

Greens Leader Senator Bob Brown quite rightly calls it the “Continue Polluting Regardless Scheme”.  He says, “The Rudd Government’s targets have failure written all over them.  Yet the ETS legislation will lock them in until 2020 since any increase will trigger compensation claims worth billions of dollars.”

At QMSDNUG’s November meeting, Peter Ward will show us how to ensure, when it comes to SQL Server, noone can say “ur doin’ it wrong.”

Peter writes:
Bon Jovi had a hit song in the 90’s with a chorus that went something along the lines of ‘The server is running slow, and you’re to blame.  You give SQL Server a bad name’.  If you look at most Information Technology courses today this parody often rings true.  There are all sorts of exciting (and ‘sexier’) subjects such as Object Oriented Programming and Programming Abstraction but somehow the subject ‘SQL Server 101′ has been overlooked.

As a result there are set of common mistakes that are made time and time again by developers that cause an application to negatively affect the performance of SQL Server.  Peter Ward from WARDY IT Solutions (www.wardyit.com) will walk through some of the common Gotcha’s when developing an application that accesses SQL Server and how to identify possible performance issues prior to deployment.

(more…)

Neil Macdonald, David Sinnathamby and Patrick Nolan from TechnologyOne Plus : Real World WPF

Many times members have said to me, “It’s good to learn about new and upcoming technologies, but it would be even better to see them being used in a real live project.“  Well, thanks to the team at TechnologyOne Plus, this month’s QMSDNUG meeting will showcase a live one.

TechnologyOne Plus is undertaking a multi-million dollar development using WPF, Prism and a number of the latest Microsoft Patterns, Practices and Tools.

Come and see the innards of a real-world application of WPF.  Hear why they have chosen the path they have and see the challenges that they have encountered.

Bill Chesnut from Stargate Consulting : An introduction to the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) 2.0 Toolkit

We are fortunate to have Microsoft MVP Bill Chesnut (a.k.a. “BizTalk Bill”) in town for one night only and we are taking the opportunity to hold a joint meeting with BrizTalk, the Brisbane BizTalk Community.  Bill will present an introduction to the ESB 2.0 Toolkit included with BizTalk Server 2009, focussing on the concept of itineraries.

More about Bill

Bill is also the founder of the Melbourne BizTalk User Group. His 25 years in the IT industry include 12 years of Windows development, including numerous enterprise projects using Microsoft C/C++, Visual Basic and SQL Server.  More recently, Bill has been driving various application integration projects using VB.NET, ASP.NET, XML, XSLT, SQL Server and BizTalk Server to connect a variety of Microsoft Business Solutions applications with other systems.  Bill is very involved in the Microsoft User Group Community as leader of the Melbourne .Net User Group.  Check out his blog at http://www.biztalkbill.com!

RSVP:
All welcome.  Bring your colleagues.
An early rsvp by email to mike@fitzsimon.com.au will help with planning.