New Game Review Site
I've been working on this Drupal powered site. It's an open project. Anyone that wants to join in, please do. There's no money in it for me, just the expense of paying for the hosting and domain name. Maybe we'll get some product samples for review down the line, but that's just wishful thinking. Well, who would say no to free games? We also plan to review hardware, peripherals, motherboards, controllers and all that stuff. If you're interested in helping, use the contact page on the site.
The goal is simply to create an open community review site. Currently, reviews have to be submitted unless you are an author. We are accepting applications to become an author and are keen to recruit as many as possible. In the future I'll be adding an automated system that will allow anyone to post a review or rank a game, and that will also allow efficient search of a game score/review database. With such a system we will avoid the problem of people using the site as a link farm and provide a means for us to keep outright comment spam under check.
The site layout isn't finished yet. In particular some things aren't quite right in IE - mainly because I try not to use that awful mess of a browser. Suggestions are appreciated. There should be plenty of bandwidth and the server should be reasonably responsive. Again, if you have any problems with the site, or find page delivery is unreasonably slow, let me know and I will do what I can to improve matters.
Telstra Bigpond customer service annoyances
A couple of weeks ago Telstra Bigpond began to experience DNS problems with various sites. Other ISPs such as Netspace, and Internode were fine, but Telstra could not resolve those sites. I could connect to those sites and get data from them, but only by raw IP. Clearly, I could route to the sites via Bigpond, so why couldn't their domain name servers route to them to make name queries? I knew for a fact that some of the sites were doing their own DNS, so the domain name server for the site's name and the actual site had the same address. It couldn't be an isolated routing problem (which would have been beyond Bigpond's control).
I made specific tests of their domain name servers to check what came back, and they weren't even returning useful error codes when they failed to process the names. That is to say they weren't saying that the name didn't exist, they were returning that there was an an (unknown) error. I contacted Telstra Bigpond technical support to report the problem.
On the first try at contacting them by phone, I explained the issue over and over, but the employee on the phone simply insisted that they couldn't do anything about the issue and I would have to make an email report. I asked if anyone else had reported similar problems. They vigorously denied that anyone had reported a problem of that kind.
Confirmation that the problem is widespread
I was already fairly certain, given the DNS tests I'd performed, but I wanted to be sure. I contacted a couple of Bigpond users around the country. I was able to confirm that the problem was reproducible in NSW as well as Victoria. They were getting the exact same problems I was. This made it hard to believe the story I'd been told about no other complaints. A friend of mine who works for an IT support company was later to inform me that several customers who used Telstra Bigpond had complained about the same sort of issue to them.
Telstra Bigpond Technical Support do not seem to know what DNS is
On the second try at contacting them by phone, I got someone who didn't even know what DNS was. I had a nice time explaining it to her. So much for technical support, you may as well just stick your finger in your eye. She also denied that there had been other complaints, reports of queries about DNS.
Like the first person, she suggested that I remove my firewall. Yep. That's a sure fire solution to DNS problems. Thanks super-genius. I'm just guessing, but that is pretty much the only thing that Telstra Bigpond customer support ever suggest as a solution besides such gems as 'try turning it off and on again.'
On both occasions they tried to blame my 'equipment', and made vague threats that if they sent an engineer out to test and couldn't reproduce, I would have to pay. They were unclear whether by equipment they meant my modem (provided by them) or my firewall, which they repeatedly asked me to disconnect.
In the end I gave up and made an email report. So much for their vaunted 24 hour phone support that they charge so much for. It's useless. They're really only able to deal with people who have the most basic connection problems.
In the end Telstra Bigpond resolved the problem, silently. It never appeared on their network status page, either as something that was in progress or that had been resolved.
Telstra Bigpond's approach to network security is an affront
The fact that Telstra Bigpond denies reported problems and offers singularly bad advice such as removing your firewall is both shocking and disgusting. They are not helping their customers with that sort of advice, they are endangering them. If I'd been a naive user, I would have followed their idiot instructions and removed my firewall - exposing myself to the endless hammering of SQL worms and other rubbish that routinely scans my ports. I run Snort on my firewall, and I see a lot of attacks. My system would probably be secure anyway, but many users would be at risk in such situation. Is it Bigpond's intention to turn their customer base into some hacker's botnet?
This isn't the first time I've complained about Telstra Bigpond's broken policy of selling users modems without firewalls and then trying to sell them an additional software firewall that offers scant additional security over the Windows SP2 firewall. Telstra Bigpond customer support never asked me whether I ran vulnerable applications, such as a web server, on my machine. They never once warned me of the risk of removing my firewall - they just told me that they couldn't offer support unless I did so.
With this kind of awful behaviour on the part of ISPs it's no wonder that the security crisis grows every year. ISPs should have a legally enforcable duty not only to protect user's security, but to provide support and advice that is responsible and helps educate users about security risks. Having a page about viruses somewhere on their web site isn't really enough. They are happy enough to sell users down the line whenever another company or foreign government wants to identify them to invade their privacy, or for malicious purposes... In fact they seem happy enough to sell users down the line full stop. Shouldn't they put their customers a little higher on the agenda. If more people knew what was going on, maybe things would change.
Bush Fires in Victoria
There have been bush fires in Victoria and my wife's parents' house was under threat of fire. We took a few says off to stay with them and help with fire watch. In the end the fire didn't get close, but it was touch and go with the wind. All we got was a lot of smoke. You can see some pictures of fires in the immediate area: From the ABC and from ruralpress.
It looks like the fire situation is completely resolved now, as we've had several days of rain. This is quite a relief, as these things can smoulder on and on for weeks, waiting for strong winds to start them back up, if nothing puts them out.
I'm sure there are writings on this subject by people far more knowledgable than I, but it seemed that the fire services did a great job and prevented the fires from becoming much worse than they might have done. However, there were places where they simply couldn't access the fires to contain them, and there's little we can do about that. Something that could be fixed is the recurring issue of poor precautions by land owners and tennants that has made some things worse than they needed to be.
Pine Plantations near towns and coal mines are not a good idea
The problem around Yallourn North seems to have been aggravated by pine plantations. I used to live in Canberra, and pine plantations there resulted in a disaster. I think it should be obvious to anyone that pine plantations should never approach any significant urban center, or other high-risk area.
Yallourn North is the site of a large open cut coal mine, and as such in the past the government prevented plantations from going anywhere near it. It would be a grim situation if the coal mine caught fire. The plantation exclusion made sense when they first applied it, and it makes sense now. There isn't such a shortage of space in Australia to make it necessary to put commercial plantations right up against towns, or coal mines. The only way I can see this happened in the first place was that corrupt behaviour and the influence of pressure groups overruled common sense.
These badly placed plantations end up costing the tax payer millions because of the damage they do. It's a risk out of proportion to their actual value to the economy. They could never have been justified on economic grounds, not when you do the math. The fact that they were prevented in the past speaks volumes. What changed? You'd think we'd learn something from the destruction in Canberra, but apparently not.
Inadequate fire breaks - stronger regulation needed?
I used to do a lot of cycling in the Canberra plantation areas, and one thing that always struck me was that the fire breaks were not really wide enough, and not kept clear enough. By introducing stronger regulations for more realistic fire breaks we might significantly ease the pressure on fire crews when bad weather strikes. Again, the culprits are the plantation owners. It's in their own best interests to contain fires, they should be the experts on it, and yet they lose thousands of hectares year on year. It's almost as if they like paying gigantic insurance premiums. Is there some kind of fiddle going on here? Surely the cost of employing more people to maintain fire trails would be worth it?
