September 2004 Archives

Unlike the vibrant, competitive newspaper industry in England, there is a decided lack of journalistic material available daily in Australia. In Western Australia there is the choice of the nominally neutral The West Australian, or the obligatory Murdoch rag, the national The Australian.

Whilst there is an extreme lack of investigative, in-depth reporting in The West, I did find it easier to read without grinding my teeth because they didn't have an overt right-wing slant. However, in recent months, they have been shuffling to the right, such that it is not unusual to find them making rather outlandish attacks on the lefty political parties. A pertinent recent example was the leaking of a budget report announcing that the state had achieved a larger surplus than expected. Instead of lauding this achievement as sound financial management, such as the federal liberal party does regularly about its surpluses, the paper attacked it as an embarrassing blunder.

Now, I'm not arguing that the paper should not be attacking the government. However, in a situation where there are no alternatives, a more disinterested perspective would be more palatable. An ideal solution would be for more daily newspapers to be available, but I don't see that happening.

As an aside, The West has recently introduced electronic subscriptions, sllowing readers to read the paper over the internet. For this priviledge of not receiving a physical paper, you get to pay quadruple the normal $1 daily price. I always thought that electronic subscriptions, utilising savings in not having to manufacture anything, would be cheaper. It'll be interesting to watch for price alterations over time.

Update As noted by a correspondent, the right-wing influence of the only two daily newspapers in Western Australia (and The West Australian now being more right-wing than The Australian) may be the cause of the low polling of the national Labor party, rating perhaps the worst in the country in WA. When the public only sees news favourable to the Liberals, and has to deliberately seek out the whole picture from interstate news sources such as those in the Fairfax stable, the end result is all too predictable.

As I like to keep my Windows 2000 system tray clean and tidy, I do my best to remove icons that I do not find necessary. The latest of these is for Ahead's packet-writing software InCD, which has a remarkably ugly yellow blob to denote that InCD is running, and that the optical drive is empty.

If you right-click on the icon and choose options, then you will see that you can tick 'Hide tray icon'. However, what if you do this, but decide later that you want the icon back? Well, one option is to right-click the drive in windows explorer and choose 'InCD Format'. This will not format straight away, but goes to the format options screen. From there you can return to the InCD options screen that you've been looking for, and then you can untick 'Hide tray icon'. It's a slightly roundabout route, but I think it's a fair comprimise for people who are fussy enough to remove the tray icon UI in the first place.

Whilst Summer 2004 might mean around July 2004 to some, to us Southern Hemispherians it means either January 2004 or December 2004. Thus, program release dates given as a season are not very useful for a global audience.

You'd think that a large company such as Microsoft would appreciate small matters such as its geographically-dispersed customers. However, their latest DirectX SDK is described as Microsoft DirectX 9.0 SDK Update (Summer 2004).

• James N Minchin (me), computer programmer in Perth, Western Australia
• James R Minchin III, a photographer (mainly of music-related stuff) in Los Angeles
• James E Minchin, who in 2000 had some connection to King's College London
• Father James Minchin, Anglican priest at Melbourne's St Kilda parish, and author of respected book on Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, No Man Is an Island. Interviewed on Lateline, on Australian national tv in 2002.

After playing with digital television for a month, I now see that DVD (and/or) HDD recorders with analog tuners are rather anachronistic. Why record an analog signal onto a digital medium?

There do not appear to be any fully digital recorders in Australia at the moment, but I eagerly await their arrival. I suspect it may need Blu-Ray discs, with their accompanying storage increase over DVDs.

Although I have an uncommon name, and I am by far the most internet-orientated James Minchin I know of, I am dismayed to see that my web pages are barely in Google's top 10 of hits for my James Minchin. In an attempt to rectify this, I shall write the occasional blog entry about my name, in particular the Minchin part of James Minchin.

If you're after real information on this topic, then take a look at the genealogy section of this site.

• Occupations and locations of James Minchins worldwide
• Minchin place names

There is an interesting group of words that changes their spelling according to usage (in British/Aus English at least). For example, practice (noun) versus practise (verb), and licence (noun) versus license (verb). Less well known to me is peninsula (noun) versus peninsular (adjective). People often misspell the former because of its similarity to the easy-to-spell insular. Once you note that both insular and peninsular are the adjective forms, it becomes easy to remember the odd one out.

As you might expect, these words have the same origin. Insula is Latin for island, thus an insular nature is isolated, like from an island. Peninsular has the pene Latin prefix, meaning almost. Hence, it's a piece of land that's almost an island.

Although virus scanners are a necessary evil, resident virus scanners are not. Through some perhaps misguided sense of control of my PC I prefer to manually scan suspicious files as the need arises, keeping memory and CPU time available for more interesting purposes.

Being the frugal person that I am, I rely on the free and sufficient AVG Anti-Virus. It has served me well, but has had one small annoyance. Even though it is not performing its resident virus scanning function, it places an AVG icon in the system tray. Although this icon can be clicked, and the AVG Control Centre shut down, it always returns at startup.

When I reinstalled Windows a few weeks ago I took special care when installing AVG to include only the minimal components necessary. The result of this was that the icon no longer appears automatically. It turns up when I manually run the AVG Control Centre, but when I shut it down it remains closed.

Although it's a bit annoying for a product to not include a feature such as the ability to shut itself down once and for all after installation, I accept these little eccentricities as the price of using free software.

It's been a while since I've accidentally come across one of those appalling garish retail sites that were so common soon after the birth of commercial activity on the web. I thought they'd been wiped out by evolution, but there is at least one still out there. Stancom Computing certainly does their business no benefit with an embarrassing huge-fonted infinite-length home page. You can tell even before checking the page source that it's been put together by a novice using Frontpage.

Needless to say that I won't be shopping there.

Robert Cringely can always be relied upon to find the interesting techie aspect to any oncoming natural disaster, and make us wish we were in his shoes. In A Hurricane Named Sinatra he describes what he's taking during his evacuation from hurricane Frances he includes:

Finally, I have on my wrist a watch with a built-in 256 megabyte USB flash drive holding all my e-mail since 1993, everything I have written since the late 1980s, and a bootable Linux partition.

For me, the only time I think about politics and politicians is when I don't like what is happening. If there's not anything I disapprove of, then I don't even contemplate the topic. However, a politician doing things against my wishes, but in my name, really irks me. And that is the nub of the negative feeling about politics in general. The only people who care are those who feel badly about it. And that's not a bad thing at all.