You wanna know how to tell if you’re downloading a slow torrent? I now get excited when it tops 1.0 kbps. There’s only about 5MB left but I’m starting to think it would be quicker to swim to the single person seeding and ask them to just copy the file onto a disk for me. That or wait for continental drift to create Neo-pangaea so I can just walk.

As a few students have already noticed, the official team listings for 433-440 Advanced Software Engineering Project have been placed on the subject web site. I hope to have a great year with everyone involved!

I’ll now have to start setting aside a beer budget for team A…

Is it just me or does the Australian Government fundamentally have something against its citizens using the Internet? The latest is a proposal to require ISPs to ban users who are caught pirating copyrighted material. I thought punishing criminals was the job of the police?

However, I have worked out what the reason is behind all these attempts to destroy Australia’s internet access: the Government is attempting to dissuade or prevent people from using the Internet so that our crappy networks will be able to handle the increasing bandwidth needed for multimedia transfers (think YouTube, IPTV, Skype, etc). Instead of upgrading the networks I’m sure it’s much cheaper to just stop people using them. Devious bastards.

Update: Another article on the subject from Ars Technica.

I quite like the new styling of Spencer Street Station, I think the renovations were long overdue and the whole station is much easier to navigate. What baffles me is the name change. “Southern Cross Station”? I’m pretty sure having the street name is far less confusing for everyone and allows us all a little more alliteration in our lives. Still, what’s more puzzling that original change is the fact that they can’t seem to ditch the original name! See, it turns out that all the signs read “Southern Cross formerly Spencer Street”. So what was the point of the name change?

I predict that within 10 years time it will be renamed “The Station”, only to realise that’s idiotic and change back to “Spencer Street”.

I just bought a new keyboard/mouse combo today to act as inputs for my laptop when I’m at work. I went with the Microsoft Wired Desktop 500 set and it’s pretty nice. There is one, glaring, problem though: the keyboard has a PS/2 connector. Pretty useless on a laptop that doesn’t have a PS/2 port!

Why Microsoft would even make non-USB keyboards anymore? I guess I should have gone for the more expensive wireless set. At least the mouse is usable.