If you spot any errors let me know!

John Gruber reflects on Apples recent decision to boot a ton of “sexy” apps from the App Store. Personally I think they should have been dumped into their own category, but there isn’t one at the moment so I think Apple probably has a case against most of them for being incorrectly listed.

Speaking of scale and exploration, check this out.

Scientists believe life on earth travelled here on comets millions of years ago.

There are so many puzzling things about life and the universe and we don’t devote nearly enough resources to figuring them out. The sheer scale of the universe should be a much bigger deal to everyone.

Recently the big movie studios teamed up to take on iiNet, one of Australia’s largest Internet Service Providers for not policing copyright infringement on their network. Currently the movie studios attempt to track peer to peer file sharing and record the IP Addresses of users transferring data related to copyrighted materials. They then track these IP Addresses back to the ISP’s and ask them to forward letters advising users of their breach of copyright law. Some ISP’s pass these letters on while others refuse. Unfortunately the movie studios don’t see this as going far enough and seeing as taking individual users to court is time consuming, expensive, and potentially damaging to the movie studios plans for policing the internet, they’ve decided that their best course of action is to force the burden of monitoring and enforcing copyright law onto the ISP’s.

The major problem with this methodology for cutting down on piracy is that it cuts out the judicial system and gives private companies the responsibility of being both accuser and judge. It’s fundamentally flawed.

In the current case Justice Cowdroy ruled in favour of iiNet - “The evidence establishes that copyright infringement of the applicant’s films is occurring on a large scale … however, such a fact does not necessitate or compel … a finding of authorisation, merely because it is felt that ’something must be done’ to stop the infringements” (SBS news & The Australian).

Michael Gist does a great job covering Justice Cowdroy’s explanation as to why the three strikes policy proposed in other countries, where the user is warned three times of copyright infringement and then banned from the internet, isn’t reasonable here. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has come out and publicly stated that it won’t promote with three strikes polices adding that “Australia already has copyright laws to encourage ISPs and copyright owners to work together to deter copyright infringements over the internet” (ITNews).

This is great news for the Australian people and now all we have to do is ward of that ridiculous Internet filter and keep fighting for our internet rights and the opportunity to innovate.

- Update: Proof reading welcomed.

There’s been a lot of back and forward on how horrible Facebook has handled there updates to default user privacy settings most of which is pretty ridiculous.

Facebook recently presented every user with a popup that asked them to review their privacy settings. It introduced simpler privacy options and forced every single user to look at them for the first time. If the user had never previously configured a privacy setting and clicked accept on the popup without making any changes then a new more public default settings group was applied.

Most of the uproar centered around this “taking advantage of users habits of not reading popups and just hitting ok”. Yes they should be aware of this precedent. Yes they are taking advantage of it. Are they causing harm by doing so? Openness is going to be absolutely essential in the future internet and openness will create a better Facebook for Facebook users. The goal of Facebook should be to provide the best Facebook they can provide and if that means being more open they’ve had to find a way to try and do that. That Facebook made a decision that would impact every single one of there users with an intrusive alert box that explains the changes and provides the privacy options available right there should be applauded not slammed. 

One day we’re going to stop creating walls around our data and trying to limit it’s availability, services like Facebook are realising this and being pro-active about it. The internet brings with it unprecedented access to knowledge and information and we shouldn’t be focusing on services that wall this wonderful data source off. We should be striving to share and work with this amazing data set to push society forward. 

Here’s how I did it:

This is the page we have to parse: http://www.asx.com.au/asx/markets/equityPrices.do?by=asxCodes&asxCodes=nvt

I used this simple HTML DOM Parser to make life easy: http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/

This is the code:

< ?php include_once('simple_html_dom.php');

function scraping_asx() {

$html = file_get_html('http://www.asx.com.au/asx/markets/equityPrices.do?by=asxCodes&asxCodes=nvt');

foreach($html->find('table[class=datatable]') as $data) {
        $item['last'] = trim($data->find('td', 0)->plaintext);
        $item['change'] = trim($data->find('td', 1)->plaintext);
		$item['volume'] = trim($data->find('td', 7)->plaintext);
    }
    $html->clear();
    unset($html);
    return $item;
}
$scrape = scraping_asx();
?>

<html>
	<head>
		<title>Stock Price</title>
		<style type="text/css">
			div#stock{
				border:1px solid;
				width:130px;
				padding-left: 10px;
			}
		</style>
	</head>
	<body>
		<div id="stock">
			<p id="stock_price"> Price: <? echo $scrape['last']?></p>
			<p id="stock_change"> Change: <? echo $scrape['change']?></p>
			<p id="stock_volume"> Volume: <? echo $scrape['volume']?></p>
		</div>
	</body>
</html>

I’m aware that the foreach loop probably isn’t necessary, but I’m ok with it.

HTML parsing is neat. I’ll probably toy with it a lot more doing some iPhone or simple web app dev in future.

Ray Kurzweil thinks improving technology and a deeper understanding of how the human body works will improve everything from our physical abilities to our mental capacity by repairing and enhancing our organs using nanobots.

The world is changing so quickly that every day brings a new miracle. Never stop inventing!

Exciting that we found another earth like planet. Disappointing because the -200C to 2000C daily temperature range would make landing there difficult. When you think about it, life on earth is horribly fragile. Keep looking fellas!