From the monthly archives:

February 2009

Australians Scared of the Internet, Need Protection

28 February 2009

Senator Stephen Conroy recently confirmed that a bureaucrat will decide what online material offends you and it will be blocked. When only 2% of Labour voters support its filtering policy and 90% of Internet users indicate they would opt out of filtering of adult material, why is the Government pushing forward with this plan?

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Lawyers Can Be Funny, Donate to Trees for Life

20 February 2009

One of the problems with the legal profession is the ingrained technophobia, and the inevitable result. To immerse us in the law practice experience, the first week’s reading for the GDLP course was provided in the form of a brick. A digital copy could have been provided for a fraction of the cost. At least the voluntary donation for casual Friday was for the benefit of Trees for Life.

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Legislative Spaghetti: Price Fixing under the TPA

11 February 2009

Sometimes you come across legislative drafting that is so bad that there’s no excuse for it. The Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth) s 45A(1) deems price fixing to substantially lessen competition for the purposes of s 45. It does this in one 152-word sentence that scores 0.0 on the Flesch Reading Ease Test and has a Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level of 63.1.

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Application vs Document Focus in the Taskbar

10 February 2009

Microsoft has redesigned the Taskbar in a way that closely mimics the Mac OS X Dock, but in doing so Microsoft has ported some of the worst aspects of Mac OS X to Windows. With the default configuration on Windows 7, whenever I want to switch to what I want to do, I have an extra click. And, while rearranging items on the Taskbar is finally supported, there’s no way to rearrange individual documents.

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Another WMP 12 Large Tag Bug

6 February 2009

When adding my collection of MP3s to the WMP 12 library, I found that some files were added without any of the metadata ordinarily read from the tags, like title, artist, and album. Further investigation showed that WMP 12 has a massive memory leak when reading tags from MP3s, causing it to chew up all available memory.

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OpenType Ligatures Coming to Word 14?

5 February 2009

While writing a long and interesting paper on Australia’s Telecommunications Access Regime, I found that Microsoft Office Word 12 has half-baked support for OpenType ligatures when running on the Windows 7 Beta. It appears Microsoft has been working on implementing OpenType ligatures in Word, and we may finally see support for them in Word 14.

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Australia Defeats Sun, Blog is Conceived

4 February 2009

For six consecutive days, the maximum temperature in Adelaide topped 40°C. That’s the longest stretch since 1908. But finally the mercury has dropped below 40°C, and to commemorate Australia’s historic victory over the sun, I’ve started a blog dedicated to my inchoate, upside-down perspective. Welcome to Orzeszek Blog.

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