Buman runs for Parliament!

The news we've been waiting for! Arguably the dimmest of our elected council representatives, Aaron Buman, is running as an independent for the House of Representatives.

The ABC radio news article says that he is confident voters would realise the benefits of living in a marginal seat blah blah blahdy blah blah.

For a preview as to how this clown will perform in office, wander down to a council meeting or a development committee meeting and check him out. His infantile enthusiasm, while refreshing for a tot, is somewhat out of place in this environment. He's a bit of a joke.
Save your vote and keep Grierson in. She mightn't do much but she does it well and is less of an embarrassment!

Democracy in Action

...or should that be "democracy inaction"?
Just sat through a developmet application session of Newcastle Council. What a strange event.
Councillors Buman and O'Neill giggled and passed notes and talked almost throughout the entire session. They behaved worse than schoolkids. If I had a blackboard duster I would have thrown it at them like we used to in the good old days of pedagogical instruction.
The councillors from our ward, our actual elected representatives, the ones that actually showed up, were keen to just vote the development application through and be done with it. It was a complete joke. The council is totally hamstrung by its own seemingly incompetent members and a fear of the dreaded Land and Environment Court.
Councillors Gaudry, Eade, Parsons and McKenzie were on our side in opposing the development. Bless them. The rest couldn't give a bugger. "Heritage heretics" Keith Parsons calls them.
Here's the gist of an email I received from Barbara Gaudry:

Thank you for your email.
I am very disappointed for you and the other local residents.
I really believe in the merits of the case you were putting and Ihad hoped that by drawing the analogy with the Glebe Road decision that the other Councillors might see it in that light and think that it was worth the chance of our decision being upheld.
I don't believe in risking ratepayer's money if there is no/little chance of succeeding in the Land and Environment Court but I thought that a precedent was there with the Glebe Road decision.
The houses are in the section of Glebe Road between Watkins Street and Union Street and I managed to get Councillor support (on the previous Council) to reject a DA for the demolition and replacement of one of these houses.
The proposed new house was totally out of character with the other houses in the block.
The developer then went to the Land and Environment and lost the case.

From memory Keith was not correct in saying that the Glebe Road houses were already on a list being considered for some kind of protection when we made our decision to reject the demolition of one of the houses and its replacement with a new dwelling.
I think that the decision to consider possible listing of these houses came later when we were reviewing our LEP (Local Environment Plan) which is a statutory document.
I don't think that these houses still have any statutory protection as the assessment process wasn't funded by Council (I am relying on memory and haven't checked the current status).

Unfortunately, there are some Councillors (4 at least) who vote for a Development no matter what.
They invariably put the rights of the developer ahead of the residents.
This is extremely disappointing as we are meant to look at each DA on its merits.
Our decisions about the 'merits of the case' are subjective of course but there needs to be some flexibility in decision making.

I am sorry that we failed the other night.

Regards
Barbara."

What a top lady. I was considering joining the Labor party until they dumped her hubby and replaced him with the execrable Jodi MacKay but now I might reconsider.
It still leaves us with the constant irritation of Buman and O'Neill. If ever there was a case for the Local Government Minister to sack the council it would be these two dullards. What a waste of oxygen they are!

My little corner of the Internet

Just added a new link to this here blog. Its my new home page. More of an application than a static home page.
http://thechums.dyndns.org:9090/cocoon/vomoir
I wrote the application in my most favoured of all the web application development frameworks: Cocoon.
I love it. Once you get your head around it, its an absolute snack to implement fairly complicated interactions betwixt user and server. You can upload photos with previews, add new links to the page, dynamically show different menu options according to your access rights etc. Its all done with XML and relies pretty heavily on XSLT to weave the magic.
I'm currently working on base64 encoding of image thumbnails. Cocoon can rescale an image on the fly which saves you having to generate a separate thumbnail but it takes a bit of a belting on the server while its processing this request. When you have a bunch of photos in your album, the app can grind to a halt or stop generating the images altogether.
I create a separate xml file that contains metadata about the image. I extract EXIF data from the photo and save salient items into the metadata xml, like date taken, image dimensions etc.
I figured that while I'm doing this, I could generate a base64 representation of the scaled image and save that as a CDATA element in the xml. I could also go one step further and XmlHTTPRequest (XHR - the cornerstone of AJAX) to display the thumbnail that's built into the EXIF data from the browser. Hmmm. Better start thinking about this.

Why State Rail sucks

Last week (first week in July) I had a week in Canberra working from FrOGTech's worldwide headquarters (the FrogglePlex). The Froggies graciously paid for my flight down to Canberra and I was going to travel by train back to Sydney on the Saturday so I could catch up with Lisa, Mark, Emma, Tim and Michelle and go and see the Rugby test.
So far so sweet.
I turfed myself out of bed at 6am in order to get ready for the anticipated train journey scheduled to depart Bungers at 7:14am. I knew the train was fairly regular as I had heard the bloody thing leaving at this time every day during the week.
Brother in law Keef and I sat chatting in the car waiting for the conveyance along with another bunch of potential travelers in a car next to us. Shivering on the platform but out of our view were a bunch more people (about 5 or 7) all eagerly awaiting the Carriage of Destiny to whisk us away to Sydney.
40 minutes past the allocated time there was still no train.
Someone on the platform put the call to the rail guys in Canberra to find out what was happening. It transpires the train was canceled and they were going to provide us with coaches instead.
Fine, I thought. As long as I'm in Sydney by mid afternoon, I don't care how I get there (as long as its before kick off).
Another 20 minutes elapsed and again the call was put to the rail guys in Canberra. Oh, they remarked, the coach driver couldn't see anyone at Bungendore so he's moved on to Goulburn!
Now I'm all in favour of positive discrimination but giving bus driving jobs to blind people can't be too good for business, even one with as poor a reputation as RailCorp's.
There were at least 10 people at the freaking train station in various stages of hypothermia. How could he not see any of us!!
Even if he were totally blind he could have heard us from the chattering of our teeth due to the aforementioned hypothermia.
I say 'he' because dare I say it, no woman would have been so cavalier in the commissioning of her duties.
Let's just say that blind, ex-truckie bloke bus drivers tend to take things a little easy!
After the shock of being abandoned by our erstwhile rail friends wore off, we hightailed it back the the Young residence where I hit the web and hastily booked a flight on QANTAS to Sydders.
Another hour and $270 later I was Sydney bound. Thank god for the flying kangaroo and VISA card!
This might sound like a cheesy advertorial but if it wasn't for some regular flightage out of our National Capital, non-car bound travellers would be screwed. If you had the misfortune to be relying on the flimsy non-service of State Rail but without the wherewithal to have ready cash in the form of a credit card, then you'd be screweder and probably still stuck on the frozen platform of Bungendore Rail station.

I sent our RailCorp buddies an email requesting that they refund me the $270 buckaroos I had to drop to make up for their incompetence and now I have to wait 5 to 7 working days for them to get back to me.
I don't hold out much hope.
If ever you're tempted to take a train to our national capital, don't.
RailCorp's website says they're "Safe Clean and Reliable".
Safe: sure if you can't see it or touch it or it doesn't exist, it can't hurt you.
Clean: Yup, same again. You can't get cleaner than absolute nothingness (very Zen).
Reliable: Ah, not quite. Unless they mean Reliable not to turn up.

Nightmare Update

Thanks to support from the Independents, the development at Blamey Avenue will now go ahead. Yes, you read correctly, the Independents along with a bunch of other myopic dimwits that are our elected representatives on the council, have decided to become pro-development! (I originally thought it was the Greens but they're OK.)
In a 8-5 decision, the developer has been given the go ahead to violate the unique character of the street. This doesn't bode well for the opponents of the Nightmare on Freyberg.

It'll only be a matter of months before the new owners are smugly sidling up to us at the street christmas party and whispering in our collective ears: "See, I told you so!"
Will I be offering them a congratulatory beer and shaking their hands to celebrate the birth of Jesus, the Boy Wizard? No siree. They can osculate my hail damaged rear end as far as I'm concerned.

All that is required to get these things through is a dithering planning approval guy on the council who takes his advice from an "independent" consultant who also dishes out advice to development applicants. Can anyone spell "conflict of interest". I don't think the council planning department can!

Return of the Nightmare on Freyberg Street

It Lives!
Apparently someone at the council said that the myopic design for the house on number 2 was, surprise, surprise, inappropriate.
Hurrah, we cried. The little people have won!
But no. It is not to be.
The decision process at our council seems to work like this:
They devise a series of guidelines that determine the setbacks and boundaries for dwellings on a block. Streetscape rapists come along and pick a design off the internet that is well outside the boundaries and setbacks specified by the "guidelines".
The process is in place.
The council planners correctly flag the design as inappropriate and things are looking good. But wait, lurking around the corner is a planning department superior who flies in the face of the guidelines and returns a positive verdict for the vandals. Why have a guideline? Why have a planning department? Why does the council waste ratepayers' money employing these people if all they're going to do is bend over to the people pushing these out of place home designs?
I can't believe that the developers don't have the resources to employ a half competent architect to come up with a house plan that fits on the block and won't stand out like a sore thumb. But instead they run a quick Google search and come up with a bog standard A.V. Jennings nightmare that has about as much street appeal as a pile of dog shit.
Its the thin edge of the wedge my friends. In 12 years time people will drive into Richley Reserve past rows of soulless A.V. Jennings homes and say to their kids that this used to be a really nice place to live.
Now it looks like any crappy street in Merewether or Fletcher.
Welcome to the future. For a preview, walk down Hooper Street or look at the image of their 'redesign' above.
Note the timber upper bit. According to the council's team of crack development approvers, this makes a lot of difference to the "streetscape friendliness" of the dwelling. It is still an inappropriate kit home.
The council should be renamed the 'Fruit Fly Circus' as they seem to be able to perform multiple back flips in a single conversation.
At one stage they say that the erection of a car port too close to the front boundary in an adjoining property can't be done as it will "affect the streetscape", and before drawing breath, they'll say that relaxing the setbacks so a shoebox can be squeezed onto the block is OK because the guidelines "are only guidelines".
Where does it leave us?
Who the fuck knows! You can't argue against any sort of hideous construction because the council isn't swayed by the character of a street, yet you can't build a half decent car port too close to the boundary because it'll upset the "street scape". I can't figure it out.
There was an on-site meeting yesterday (June 27) with the council's development team, some councilors, the mayor and a whole bunch of disenfranchised residents about a similar proposal in an adjacent street.
The developer guys couldn't wait to get out of there.
The Lord Mayor's response to the proposed building's imposing bulk and its affect on privacy was that these issues can be fixed by "privacy screens"!!!
Stay tuned for an update on that little debacle as well.
I remain,
Your obedient servant
Vomoir.
Check this out. Its Google groups thingy that has a bit more detail (if you're interested).

The Pitfalls of Web Design and a Happy Marriage

To paraphrase Kid Creole:

"If you want to stay happy for the rest of your life, never make a web designer your wife, so for my personal point of view get another girl to marry you"

My wife's not a web designer, she's a face painter and I'm in the throes of trying to redesign her rather pedestrian website which I threw together in haste a while back. Thing is, I want to try and get my web design chops up to some sort of professional level, where net aficionados can look at it for all its web standards compliance and exquisite design beauty, but Lisa just wants a mid '90's style frames and tables horror show "like everyone else has got". Sheesh.
I spent hours of my own freaking time working and reworking a minor masterpiece of css and xhtml and came up with a relatively palatable site that looked OK on Firefox but, as was expected looked like an unmade bed on IE.
I sent the url to my sister who works for the local council where they run computer specs straight out of the 70's. She's a good testing site for low resolution html rendering as a result of the council's PC frugality and the verdict was negative. I had to virtually start again. I can see why most of the web-design community stick to tables and <font> tags. Who needs this css crap anyway. I'll keep chipping away. I suppose the more I do the easier its going to become.
Watch this space.

Ship Ahoy!

Newcastle suffered the worst storm in 30 years on the weekend just past. Some say it was classified as a Category 1 Cyclone, which is pretty far out.
A ship ran aground in the wee hours of Friday morn right smack on one of the city's most iconic beaches: Nobbies.
No one on the ship was injured but there's the ever present threat of fuel leakage if the ship's hull integrity is compromised. So far so good. As of this writing the port authority is awaiting the arrival of tugs from far afield as Singapore and Melbourne.
Our place only got a bit of water in the garage, no big deal. The biggest tragedy for us was that our internet connection was down for a good five (5) minutes.
Others weren't so lucky.

What Does "My Bad" Mean?

Seriously, what does it mean?
My Bad. My Bad what. Where's the verb. Why do Americans insist on making nouns and adjectives into verbs.
As mentioned I was at the Google Developer Day last week and one of the presenters had the word 'incentivize' in his slide.
This is up there with 'my bad'. If you stick 'ize' and the arse end of anything it suddenly becomes a freaking verb. You in effect 'verbize' it.
It's this whole verbization that makes me quite cross. You do it often enough and suddenly you've got a whole bunch of new words polluting the wordosphere. Diarize is a beauty. Monetize is another that Google has introduced into the Geek's lexicon.

Google Developer's Day

Phil the neighbour and I attended the Google Developer's Day in Sydney on the 31st.
Quite a sumptuous affair seeing as they provided lunch, snacks and drinks all day and they didn't charge a bean.
I felt a bit of a hypocrite as I don't use any Google development stuff but did I mention it was free?
Interesting day, with the boffins from Google showing the application of their various apis and javascripty goodness.
Expect to see lots of maps and stuff appearing here soon.
Of particular interest was the new Google Gears api wherein your shiny new ajax application can persist its data locally using a modified version of SQLLite, so if you suffer fomr a network outage, your app will soldier on regardless. Neat.
Also the maps api was particularly interesting. It looks rather straight forward so now I'm going to add maps aplenty to my Hunter Skysailors website. The Google Web Toolkit looks particularly choice: complete ajax applications written entirely in Java. There's a slew of support tools and Eclipse plugins available and you don't get bogged down with all of javascript's inconsistencies. Check it out.

Funky Cat

This is one Funky Cat! Why, its none other than Liam after getting an instant makeover from the dedicated professional staff at Funfaces (actually that's Lisa, the better half and Liam's favourite Mum).
One day he'll grow up and be really embarrassed but at the moment he's the cutest kid ever, except for Maddison (in case she's reading this).

Lisa's part time hobby

My wife Lisa paint faces for a part time living. Check out her website here.
I need to improve it (a lot) and stick some nifty ajax eye candy on it and generally make it a bit more sexy.
Stay tuned.

The Internet's latest e-Ontraprenewer

I got adsense! I don't know what it means but the result thereof is that a river of free cash is supposed to flow into my bank account.
What could be simpler. With my free dough I'm going to buy a Rugby franchise or a yacht, maybe both.
Apparently adsense is what sets Google apart from Microsoft in that Google can actually make money from their biznis model and all MS can do is chisel money out of people too lazy to learn about Open Office or Linux.
At the moment its only for disaster relief and other relatively lame stuff but give it a few weeks and I'm buying a Lexus.

Nightmare on Freyberg Street

I live in a lovely little street in Newcastle, Australia (latitude -32.933187S, longitude 151.705904 E).
The street itself was established during the forties and most of the houses date from that time.
Unprepossessing, charming yet functional little dwellings for your average Ozzie suburban family just trying to make their way through life.
Each one is single storey and the view up the street is delightful, rows of these little cottages lining the road into the 385 hectare bush reserve of Blackbutt.
I'm stressing the charm and the heritage of my cozy little street because it is about to be shamelessly raped by an ex-resident.
The ex-resident is proposing, along with her lawyer husband, to erect a totally inappropriate dwelling of monstrous proportions that will dwarf all the houses around it and occupy nearly every square centimetre of land of the tiny block.
What is it with these people? The woman in question used to live next door to the house she is about to demolish, in what was her grandmother's house (who would be spinning violently in her grave if she knew of the carnage her descendant is about to unleash on the neighbourhood).
It incenses me that they think they can get away with it. Look at the photo. That's the design they've chosen. 296 square metres of overindulgence on a 340 sq metre block. The mind boggles.


There'll be more on this. Just you wait, you haven't seen the last of me. Oh no.

I've entered the Blogosphere!

I've done it! I've jumped on another bandwagon.
First it was a mohawk then pierced genitals, now its blogging.
I'm only about 4 years behind the rising tide of irrelevance that is clogging the 'internets' but what the heck. I'll give anything a go. I even tried Ice once but it only served to give me brain freeze. How those skinny guys with scabby faces get addicted I don't know.