Today’s Rant of the Day has not been published as quick as I would like, but I only got around to ranting about it today. The target is Woolworths Limited and their decision to restrict customer choice in payment methods. (Watch out Senator Conroy, i’ve not finished with you yet).

The original plan was to fill up a trolley full of shopping – all the smallest packets possible – go through the checkout and try to pay with my Visa Debit card by pressing Credit. Of course Woolies now refuse this, forcing you to press Savings or Cheque – but not everybody has those functions on their Visa Debit Card. Cue ranting and storming out in a huff. But then i thought it wouldn’t be fair on those behind me in the queue (because they never have enough people working on shift), or the poor checkout chick who’s probably gone thorough this before.

So the target is their Head Office instead, using their ever-so-friendly website which allows you to cancel your Everyday Rewards card online.

I am cancelling my card in disgust at Woolworth’s recent policy change in refusing to accept Visa Debit cards as a Credit transaction.

By forcing me, the customer who pays your wages, to use a Debit transaction, you are forcing the payment to go via the EFTPOS network rather than the Visa network.

As a Credit Union customer, I get slammed on EFTPOS transactions because of the high charges that the major banks charge non-profit institutions like Credit Unions, unlike Visa or Mastercard charges. So this results in a transaction charge to me.

Woolworths may argue that it has the right to refuse payment methods. However you don’t have the right to tell me to switch my financial services provider to continue shopping at your store, which is what i have been told by your representatives.

I also have the right to boycott all Woolworths Limited’s stores, and to tell as many people as i can to do the same.

Good riddance, see you at Coles.

Simon

I wonder what Marketing-approved Standard Response I will receive?

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After having dug to a depth of 10 feet last year, Melbourne scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 100 years and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network more than 100 years ago.

Not to be outdone by the Victorians, in the weeks that followed, a Sydney archaeologist dug to a depth of 20 feet, and shortly after, a story published in the Sydney Morning Herald read: “New South Wales archaeologists, finding traces of 130-year-old copper wire, have concluded that their ancestors already had an advanced high-tech communications network 30 years earlier than the Victorians”….

One week later, the Courier Mail in Brisbane, Queensland, reported the following:”After digging as deep as 30 feet in his pasture near Beenleigh, Queensland, John Brown, a self-taught archaeologist, reported that he found absolutely bugger all. John has therefore concluded that 130 years ago, Queensland had already gone wireless.

Just makes you proud to be a Queenslander!

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Now as you probably know I’m not one that usually subscribes to conspiracy theories, (for example, I don’t believe that the British Royal Family had anything to do with the tragic death of Princess Diana, apart of course from ordering it, using their loyal subjects) but there has been a recent pattern of events here in Australia that have been far too conincidental.

Australia, of course, is one of the world’s most beautiful and unspoilt countries to visit. A large proportion of its economy relies on the Mining and Tourism sectors. However, due to its amazing natural history and evolutionary process (until, of course, the British invaded in 1779), the land down under has been home to many wild and wonderful creatures that simply don’t exist anywhere in the world. Everyone knows about our ‘roos, wallabies, wallaroos and koalas, but Tourism Australia, in partnership with the Federal Government, supress all information about the Dropbear, for fear of crippling our vital tourism industry. They even regularly force changes to websites, under national security laws, to websites such as the Wikipedia.

For fear of censorship, this article will not talk about the dropbear. However we suspect that the Government have been putting commercial and economic pressure on Facebook to remove content such as this fan page, where young Aussies celebrate our wonderful killer koala-like meat-eating marsupials (whilst also trying to subtley warn tourists who come to our shores to watch out for them, and not to disappear in our CBD parks due to the increasing silent ambush tactics used by hordes of dropbears).

As is commonly known, and opposed by the majority of its citizens (a.k.a. voters), the Australian Government are attempting to censor the internet, lead by the poltiical ambitions of idiots such as Chief Censor Conroy and a few minority independent senators going for the Christian or “Family Friendly” vote. An excellent test of the Government’s powers came to the fore when Facebook decided to ban all Pages that wern’t related to a product or service. Consequently, the administrators of the Drop Bear fan page, which was set up to warn visitors to Australia given censorship by official channels, had to prove Dropbears existed with “official” confirmation otherwise the Page would be permanently closed and deleted.

It doesn’t take a genius to put 2+2 together doesn’t it?

Well apparently it does … Australia today announced that their Internet Filtering “Live” Pilot (a.k.a. censorship) was a complete success – even though less than a third of the “blacklist” contains illegal material – was a complete success and it will push ahead with mandatory internet filtering. As I’ve said before, anything to do with “child sex abuse content, bestiality, sexual violence and the detailed instruction of crime or drug use” should quite rightly be monitored, and people who access such information should be caught, prosecuted and punished with the full force of the law. However, all that will happen is these b@stards will use widely-available technologies to bypass the filter … which makes it more difficult (not impossible, just difficult) for them to be caught by the miniscule 91 extra AFP officers that wil be funded to try and catch them.

Moreover, due to the sensitive nature of the blacklist, access to it is restricted with no oversight to prevent governmental censorship of legal material … for example, what next? Anti-abortion websites? Pro-abortion websites? Aethiest websites? Dropbear warnings? Facebook? Whistleblower websites like Wikileaks (currently tried to be censored by the Australian and British governments, among others)?

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I needed to do some development and testing in IBM WebSphere Application Server 7.0, however I was unable to get the bugger installed in my development environment (on Mac OS X 1.6 … well it has only been out for a week ) VMWare Fusion had to come to the rescue.

Although IBM do not support Ubuntu 9.04 as a platform, I did mange to get it working eventually through the following steps:

1. Install Ubuntu 9.0.4 as per normal; and let it update itself to include the most recent patches and updates.
2. Add the Multiverse Repository through Add/Remove Programs.
3. Install Sun’s latest JDK by following these steps (credit to Brian)

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-plugin
update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

4. Add the following to the top of the list in /etc/jvm (again, credit to Brian)

/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

5. Because Ubuntu uses dash as its default shell instead of bash, this breaks WAS’ installation routine when it comes to setting up the domain profile. (It hangs for ages at 31% when executing the importConfigArchive script, and the fails silently, which is nice.) To fix this you need to relink back to bash (according to Graham, this actually fixes a number of third-party software installation issues):

sudo -i
cd /bin
unlink sh
ln -s /bin/bash sh

6. Install the Linux build of IBM WebSphere Application Server 7.0 as normal via sudo ./launchpad.sh to the default /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer directory.
7. Because doing everything as root is not secure or cool – even for a development environment – sudo chown -hR the /opt/IBM directory to a dedicated appserver user.
8. Make sure everything works by logging into the admin console via the First Steps , and finally do a sudo update-rc.d -f gdm remove to stop the automatic GUI when you reboot the machine/vmware image.

Job’s a good’un.

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It is well known that humour is regional, but this is the first joke that I can say is truly Queenslander:

At a national conference of the Australian Hotels Association, the general managers of Cascade Brewery
(Tasmania), Tooheys (New South Wales), XXXX (Queensland), CUB (Victoria) and Coopers (South Australia) found themselves sitting at the same table for lunch.

When the waitress asked what they wanted to drink, the GM of Tooheys said without hesitation, “I’ll have a Tooheys New..”

To which the boss of Coopers rejoined, “I’ll have a Coopers, the King of Beers.”

And the bloke from Cascade asked for “a Cascade, the cleanest draught on the planet.”

The General Manager of Carlton & United paused a moment and then placed his order: “VB.”

The head of XXXX smiled and said “I’ll have a Diet Coke.”

The others looked at him has if he had sprouted a new head.

“Well,” he said with a shrug, “if you poofters aren’t drinking beer, then neither will I.”

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