Mrs Fitz is on Kangaroo Island at the moment. Her phone is not answering. I hope she is OK.
The rain is moving from the north-west. Adelaide has just had a bucketing and now it is heavy over Kingscote.
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Update
I’ve just heard from her. She was down the western end of the island. All is well.
This month’s QMSDNUG meeting is fortunate to be addressed by Joel Pobar in a re-run of his well-received Tech.Ed Australia 2009 DEV450 session.
Microsoft, Google, Netflix, Amazon and more, are using smart algorithms that leverage ever increasing clock cycles, and a plethora of user generated data, to find patterns that derive value. They’ve brought smart software to the attention of the software development mainstream: PageRank, Machine Learning, Support Vector Machines, classification techniques, search and rank, and more.
We explore some of these algorithms and their implementations using a new functional programming language for the Microsoft .NET platform, called F#. It has features and techniques that make working with data and building smarts much easier.
We’ll start with a walk through of the language, then get right down to hacking out smart algorithms that you can leverage in your own software.
Date: Tuesday 15 Sep 2009
Time: 17:30 for 18:00
Location: Microsoft Brisbane office, Level 9, Waterfront Place, 1 Eagle St, Brisbane
RSVP
All welcome. Bring your colleagues.
If you haven’t already done so, an immediate rsvp by email to mike@fitzsimon.com.au will help with planning.
These details are also on our website at www.qmsdnug.org.
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Update 15 Sep 09
Joel has an excellent blog post, Why F#? (TechEd ‘09 DEV450) with links to the source code and the PPT slides used in his presentation to QMSDNUG.
Now first up, I’m not saying anyone has done anything illegal here. But just because something is legal doesn’t mean it is not a scam.
Has anyone else received an invoice like this from Australian Business Online? I suspect many have.
In the fine print, it says …
Please Note: This invoice was generated because you listed your company details on www.abol.com.au (Australia Business Online)
I can be pretty certain that this did not happen. I regard this invoice as fraudulent. I advised info@abol.com.au that I would not be paying their invoice.
ABOL’s polite e-mail response was to say that they had contacted my “Advertising or marketing manager”. That would be me or me. Yeah, right.
Further, ABOL indicated that I had a “free” listing which has now expired and is now due for renewal.
So how good is this free listing? Here’s a part of the top-level category listings on ABOL’s home page.
Where would you expect to find my company, which develops custom software for businesses and government departments? Perhaps under IT / Communications? No, it’s not there.
Here it is. Look at the breadcrumbs. It’s filed under Shopping >> Household Goods >> Computers. Strangely, none of my clients have ever bought any software development services while on a Shopping Trip. I don’t sell household goods or computers either.
And apparently my Advertising Manager (that would be me) or my Marketing Manager (me again) approved this? One of the characteristics of spammers and scammers is that they often forget about accuracy while chasing volume.
Putting Twitter’s little javascript “recent tweets” widget in my blog’s sidebar seemed like a good idea at the time.
But when Twitter goes down, and there’s a lot of that lately, my blog wastes a lot of time looking for it. I’m reconsidering.
———————
Update
It turns out that Twitter was under DDoS attack. 
A double-header for this month’s meeting…
PLUS! See below for details on how QMSDNUG members can SAVE $500 on Tech.Ed Registration.
Date: Tuesday 21 July 2009
Time: 17:30 for 18:00
Location: Microsoft Brisbane office, Level 9, Waterfront Place, 1 Eagle St, Brisbane
RSVP
All welcome. Bring your colleagues.
If you haven’t already done so, an immediate rsvp by email to mike@fitzsimon.com.au will help with planning.
These details are also on our website at www.qmsdnug.org. (At least they were until we encountered some difficulties with the hosting provider. Check back soon, or check here on my blog, mike.brisgeek.com.)
Happy coding …
Mike Fitzsimon
Anthony examines the recently released Microsoft Visual Studio® Team Test 2010 Beta 1 product and how it can drastically reduce the “find and fix” time for bugs that are raised by your testers. Today, significant time is often wasted trying to reproduce bugs with limited success and labelling bugs as “No-repro” can be frustrating for both testers and developers.
Microsoft’s new Test and Lab Manager Application allows testers to create, manage and execute tests quickly and easily in a dedicated user interface. Using Test Cases, Test Suites and Test Plans, testers will find the new features allow them to better participate as a full team member in Visual Studio Team System.
The session will touch on the following features of the Visual Studio Team Test 2010 product:
About Anthony Borton
Anthony is a Development Process Specialist for Enhance ALM Pty Ltd, an Australian consulting and training company specializing in Application Lifecycle Management and Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. He has been working with Visual Studio Team System full-time since 2005. Anthony has worked with a variety of companies ranging in size from just 3 employees up to some of Australia’s largest companies and financial institutions. Anthony is the lead Microsoft Technical Readiness Instructor in Australia for Microsoft Visual Studio and has presented at the Microsoft launch events for both VSTS2005 and VSTS2008. Anthony is a Microsoft MVP (Team System), a Certified Scrum Master and a member of the INETA Speakers Bureau. He is also the president of the QLD VSTS users group and maintains a blog at http://www.myvstsblog.com
Actually I have to admit that the title of Anthony’s talk made me think of this excellent xkcd cartoon:
That’s how effective Senator Conroy’s proposed Mandatory ISP Filter could be according to the ACMA[1][2].
You wouldn’t accept 87% of a pool fence. Don’t accept Senator Conroys censorship scheme disguised as a plan to “protect children”.
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.
The answer is parental supervision, aided if necessary by in-home filtering software targeted at the age-group of the children.
Meanwhile, Senator Conroy forges ahead with his filtering trials. Strangely he has chosen ISPs with only business customers, not ISPs with customers who are home users likely to be impacted by the filter. No valid conclusions can be drawn from such flawed trials.
Despite criticism from the Opposition, the Greens and independent Senator Nick Xenophon, Senator Conroy’s censorship scheme remains a threat to our children’s freedom, a threat to Australia’s digital economy and a threat to our environment because it remains government policy. 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.
———————
For more information, see my earlier posts:
See also:
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1. Australian Communications and Media Authority, Closed Environment Testing of ISP-Level Internet Content Filters - Report to the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, June 2008. Available at http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_311316 p44.
2. The effectiveness of the filter could be as high as 96 percent, but only at the cost of an unacceptably high “Over-Blocking Rate” of 1 in 12 legitimate websites. Everyone in the IT industry (except the vendors of filtering products) knows that Senator Conroy’s scheme is an ineffective and horrendously-expensive white elephant.
… is better than a band of loyal followers — if you want to get noticed on Twitter. It looks like someone has built an army of fake Twitter accounts which can re-tweet on command.
Bruce Wagner, a New York City talk-show host and Twitter user, took time out to leave an erudite comment on my previous blog post about TweeterGetter. Now it is not unexpected that he might have a band of loyal followers. It is also not unexpected that they might be prompted to re-tweet Bruce’s tweet at the same time or within the same minute as far as anyone can tell.
Here’s a sequence of eight of the re-tweets. There are plenty more.
A few minutes later, they all re-tweeted again and within the same minute. That wasn’t too surprising. However what was really surprising was the fact that they all re-tweeted in exactly the same sequence.
Here are three more examples of this perfectly-synchronised re-tweeting, all in exactly the same minute and exactly the same sequence.
This prompted me to inspect the profiles of Bruce’s loyal followers / army of re-tweet-bots. It appears to me that their sole role in life is to reproduce tweets from some news source and RT @brucewagner.
In the past three days, tens of thousands of Twitter users have visited tweetergetter.com and subscribed to its promise of 19,530 new followers in 30 days. They are signing up in droves. A Twitter search for “tweetergetter” shows them all rolling in.
Is it just me or do other people think that filling in this form hands over your Twitter username and password to a spammer - or worse?
Some folks should be changing their passwords about now.
———————
Update: 16-Feb-09
Gary McCaffrey assures me he is not collecting passwords, just usernames. As I see it, this is like collecting e-mail addresses for use in future spam campaigns.
Twitter is going to be a very ugly place when McCaffrey starts selling his list to the likes of Bruce Wagner (see An Army of ReTweet-Bots… ).
———————
Update: 17-Mar-09
I removed the active link to tweetergetter.com above because some folks have reported that tweetergetter.com now has an Exit Blocker. In other words, as you try to leave the site, a confusing dialog pops up and you are taken to another web page with more marketing rubbish.
What have I done now? Looking through the site stats I came across an inbound link from www.tsa.gov - the TSA or Transportation Security Administration! Did I accidentally blog about that time I was strip-searched at LAX? No? Ok, well forget I said anything about that then.
Like any sensible organisation, the TSA operates a (Blogger) blog and welcomes feedback from its clients / customers / victims / the travelling public.
A recent post reviewed the TSA’s comment policy and chose to link to one of my more popular posts, Simple HTML for Formatting Blogger Comments, as an example of how to include hyperlinks in comments.
When linking to another blog or webpage, make sure there is no offensive content on that page. Also, long URLs knock our format out of whack, so we have to reject comments containing long URLs. There are a couple of fixes for this. Go to tinyurl.com. It is a free service that will convert your long URLs into a much shorter URL. Also, you can go here to learn how to hyperlink.
Not much of a link, is it? Using the single word “here” as hyperlink anchor text guarantees the bare minimum of Google-Juice. Still, a small drip from a large tap is better than nothing.
I also note that the TSA probably didn’t have to look too hard to find me. As I write this, I’m in the #1 position on Google results for “Blogger comment formatting”.
I take my ability to write Valid XHTML seriously. Consequently it has annoyed me that in some recent posts where I have included the online petition widget from GetUp!, my code was no longer valid XHTML. This afternoon, I took steps to fix it.
Here is the code supplied by GetUp! which uses the now-deprecated <embed> tag.
<div><object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,28,0"
width="300" height="250">
<param name="movie"
value="http://www.getup.org.au/flash/widget.swf"></param>
<param name="quality" value="high">
<embed src="http://www.getup.org.au/flash/widget.swf"
quality="high"
pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
width="300" height="250">
</embed></param></object></div>By adding the correct parameters to the <object> tag, my code is now valid.
<div><object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,28,0"
width="300" height="250">
<param name="movie"
value="http://www.getup.org.au/flash/widget.swf"></param>
<param name="quality" value="high"></param>
<param name="pluginspage"
value="http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash">
</param></object></div>I’m no longer annoyed. 
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See also: Valid XHTML to Embed a YouTube Video
Husband, Father,
Mike Fitzsimon
mike.fitzsimon
@MikeFitzAU
Software Architect
Convenor
“MikeFitz with overflow bit set…” is the personal blog of
Mike Fitzsimon.
Fitzsimon IT Consulting
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