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 have recently been doing quite a bit of development with both ExtJS and jQuery and I thought I would share my experiences with both of them. One thing to keep in mind is that I’m not going to say whether one is really good or bad - they’re both excellent libraries and your choice for any given project might simply come down to personal preference. That said, the rest of this will be my opinion on the two.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of my friends just sent me this and I felt I had to share it! I think it’s actually scarily accurate:

Some good news from browser makers today to put a cap on a great year for browser development and innovation.

Read the rest of this entry »

CouchDB is a (relatively) new database option for development that focuses on documents, rather than generic relational systems like most databases do. I think the concept is appealing and support for things like automatic versioning and distributed processing and storage could mean a lot fewer headaches that trying to get a custom system going yourself. Also interesting is the JSON storage format, which would make this ideal to use in many asynchronous web applications as the data returned can be used straight away on the browser.

I haven’t had any cause to use this system yet but I’ll be sure to write a review when I do. Anyone else taken this for a spin?

I’ve recently been developing a web-based application (a RIA one might say) and, after initially trying to get it working right in jQuery, I decided to have a go at using ExtJS, a JavaScript library I’ve been meaning to try for a while. Basically, it is a JavaScript library that includes a ton of things for building web application other libraries don’t - not surprising considering it started life as an add-on to YUI. Here is my initial impressions of it, most of which are direct comparisons to jQuery.

Read the rest of this entry »