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That’s the Pow­er­house Museum, located between Pyr­mont and Ultimo. If you could hover above it in a heli­copter, the view would look some­thing like this:

Imag­ine if you could mag­i­cally click a link and jump back in time, and see the same view from some­time between 1900 and 1939…

If you’re lost: in the older pic­ture, look beyond the chim­neystack, and just to the left. Imme­di­ately beyond the chim­ney is a vacant block of land; at the top end of this is a short road, which has on the right a not-quite-right-angle cor­ner. The road then con­tin­ues up the pic­ture — but it’s not quite straight, it bends a lit­tle to the right. If you look at the mod­ern pic­ture, you can see the same not-quite-right-angle cor­ner and the same not-quite-straight road — although now the West­ern Dis­trib­u­tor flys across the not-quite-straight road.

See the large build­ing inside the block bounded by the not-quite-straight road? That build­ing is Global Switch Syd­ney — built in the last days of “Build it and they will come”. It’s only in the last few years that it’s start­ing to reach full capacity.

The rail­way line vis­i­ble in the ear­lier pic­ture was the Dar­ling Har­bour Goods line, which formed the first part of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Goods Rail­way Line. It’s now used as the Metro Light Rail line.

Talk­ing to a work­mate who has a sick cat led to look­ing at Med­ibank Private’s pet cover.

This led to the source of (appar­ently) all pet insur­ance in Aus­tralia; which then led to com­par­i­son shop­ping between the var­i­ous resellers.

The dif­fer­ences are amus­ing, but annoy­ing. One pro­vides 15k total cover; but only $500 for tick paral­y­sis. Another only offers 9k total cover; but removes the restric­tions on what per­cent­age of that can be used for drugs/medication vs how much is for den­tal care. None of them cover treat­ment for leukemia in cats; but some add an addi­tional clause declin­ing to cover any con­di­tion for which there is a vaccine.

I’d like to go with the RSPCA - if some­one has to make a profit, they seem like a bet­ter choice than some of the for-profit com­pa­nies. But the lim­its are half that pro­vided by Med­ibank, while the pre­mi­ums are dou­ble. Sure you can skim profit off the top, but that doesn’t mean I want you to gouge me for every cent I own.

Gah. Choices, that aren’t really choices. Just what I wanted.

I was in the super­mar­ket get­ting some laun­dry pow­der last night and noticed some­thing really strange: every sin­gle brand of con­cen­trated laun­dry pow­der was adver­tis­ing on their pack­ag­ing the fact that they’re about to be relaunched in a new ver­sion. The new pow­ders are all going to be 2x as con­cen­trated, and most brands made a big deal out of the fact that the new pack­ag­ing will there­fore be half the size.

Golly. Every brand? All at once? All decid­ing to redo their for­mu­la­tion, redo their pack­ag­ing, and retool their man­u­fac­tur­ing plants, all with iden­ti­cal changes to for­mu­la­tion and pack­ag­ing, all at the same time? Unpossible!

You’d almost think that every brand of pow­der was actu­ally exactly the same, made at the same plant, and just pack­aged slightly dif­fer­ently. But that would surely never happen!

Lind­say did an excel­lent blog post yes­ter­day titled “Every­thing old is new again”, about the re-emergence of multi-dimensioned databases.

Great title, but just to prove his point, it applies even bet­ter to a post he shared on Google Reader a few days ago, writ­ten by Kurt Schrader and titled “Liv­ing in a Post Rails World”. To quote that post:

I think that the Ruby world is even­tu­ally going to end up in a model like this, writ­ing small sim­ple apps that all talk to each other, and can be replaced or upgraded at any time.

<snip two paragraphs>

All of my hard/long run­ning logic is well tested, encap­su­lated, and most likely run­ning in lit­tle agents on the wire.

Sound famil­iar? It should. Kurt has re-discovered the same prin­ci­ples that the Holy Fathers of Unix dis­cov­ered, over a quar­ter of a cen­tury ago. Doug McIl­roy, circa 1978:

(i) Make each pro­gram do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than com­pli­cate old pro­grams by adding new features.

(ii) Expect the out­put of every pro­gram to become the input to another, as yet unknown, pro­gram. Don’t clut­ter out­put with extra­ne­ous infor­ma­tion. Avoid strin­gently colum­nar or binary input for­mats. Don’t insist on inter­ac­tive input.

Later, he sim­pli­fied it:

This is the Unix phi­los­o­phy: Write pro­grams that do one thing and do it well. Write pro­grams to work together. Write pro­grams to han­dle text streams, because that is a uni­ver­sal interface.

Of course, Henry Spencer said it the best:

Those who don’t under­stand UNIX are con­demned to rein­vent it, poorly.

Some hints about using the Google Sync for iPhone. These will prob­a­bly also apply to the Win­dows Mobile sync — but I’ve not used that, so I’m not sure. I’m going to say “iPhone” con­sis­tently — but the same will apply to an iPod touch as well (mod­ulo the things that involve a 3G con­nec­tion, of course).

• BACK UP YOUR DATA. Really can’t stress this enough. The process of set­ting up the sync WILL WIPE ALL YOUR CONTACTS AND CALENDARS. Back up first.
• You can choose up to 5 cal­en­dars (not includ­ing your pri­mary cal­en­dar) to sync.
  • If you have a gmail/googlemail account, visit m.google.com/sync on your iPhone, fol­low the prompts, and you’ll be able to choose up to 5 addi­tional cal­en­dars to sync.
  • If you have a Google Apps account, visit http://google.com/m/a/«domain.com», then click “More” and then “Sync”. For this to work, your domain admin­is­tra­tor will have to have enabled Google Sync for your domain first.
  • [update]It’s been pointed out to me that Apps users can actu­ally access the sync set­tings from m.google.com/sync. Click on “Google Mobile” on the bot­tom left-hand cor­ner of the page, and you’ll be taken to a page  with lots of icons for dif­fer­ent Google ser­vices. Scroll down and make sure there’s a link that says “Not in United States?”. If it lists another coun­try, click it and change your con­try to the United States — this won’t work in any other coun­try. Once you’ve changed that and you’re back at the page with ser­vice icons, find the “Google Apps user?” but­ton, and enter your domain into the popup. You’ll now have icons for your Apps domain — includ­ing a Sync icon. Click it, and once again just fol­low the direc­tions from there.[/update].
• I have one Google Apps account for work and one per­sonal Google Apps account. How­ever, the iPhone only allows me to set up one Exchange account, so I have to pick which of the two I’m going to sync, right? Wrong! I’ve shared my per­sonal cal­en­dar with my work account, giv­ing it “Make changes to events” per­mis­sions. I’ve then set up my work account to sync with my iPhone, and cho­sen my per­sonal cal­en­dar as one of the addi­tional cal­en­dars to sync.
• If you go with the default setup, it will sync both Cal­en­dars and Con­tacts. This is almost cer­tainly not what you want. It does have the ben­e­fit of push­ing changes to con­tacts straight into the cloud — but it also has the effect of break­ing the sync between your Google con­tacts and your Address Book. That is — assum­ing you used to sync the two — which a lot of peo­ple did not, due to Google’s con­tacts man­ager being rather bro­ken. How­ever, it’s easy enough to set the sync to Cal­en­dar only. If you look at step 13 of the offi­cial instruc­tions, you’ll see both Cal­en­dar and Con­tacts selected. If you choose to sync only Cal­en­dar, Con­tacts will still be synced with Address Book by iTunes when­ever you sync your iPhone. If you’ve cho­sen to sync Address Book with Google Con­tacts as well, that will still hap­pen too.
• You can sync cal­en­dars with both an Exchange and MobileMe cloud at the same time; but as soon as you enable one of them, you can’t sync cal­en­dars with iTunes any more. You can only have one MobleMe account and one Exchange account.

I used to have a messy messy setup involv­ing Span­ning Sync pulling all my Google Cal­en­dars into iCal; then using Mobile Me to push them into the cloud; then using the iPhone’s Mobile Me sync to pull them onto the phone. Many mov­ing parts, 3 dif­fer­ent sync stages for some­thing to go wrong. Only works if you have a per­ma­nently online machine that can be doing the trans­la­tion between the Google cloud and the Apple cloud. I’m much hap­pier with this direct sync.

[update]About the con­tact sync thing. See, you only get the option to sync your Address Book and your Google Con­tacts vis­i­ble in iTunes if you’re sync­ing con­tacts with your iPhone. If you’re sync­ing con­tacts with the cloud, you’re not sync­ing with your iPhone, so you don’t get the option. If you do use Google Con­tacts, that means that the cloud and your iPhone are both up-to-date — but your desk­top is not.

If you really want instant sync­ing between your phone and your desk­top, turn on cloud-syncing of your con­tacts. If you’d pre­fer to keep your phone, desk­top, and the cloud all in sync, turn off cloud-syncing, and let iTunes han­dle the sync instead. [/update]

[update 2009-09-09] As of Snow Leop­ard, it’s no longer nec­es­sary to have an iPhone/iPod in order to get Address Book <-> Gmail Con­tacts sync­ing. So, it’s now per­fectly pos­si­ble to have your iPhone cloud-syncing your con­tacts AND have your Mac also cloud-syncing. To turn it on on your Mac, just go into the Address Book’s pref­er­ences and look under the Accounts tab.[/update]

[update]Facebook Events? Mag­i­cally pushed into your iPhone cal­en­dar? Easy!

Go to your Face­book Events page. On the top left (below the blue Face­book bar; above the big word “Events”) you’ll see “Export Events”. Click on that link, and you’ll get a popup with a long URL. Copy this URL.

Next, go to your Google Cal­en­dar. Click “Set­tings”, “Cal­en­dars”, “Import Cal­en­dar”, “Add By URL”, and paste that URL into the box.

Now visit the Sync Set­tings page, and choose your new Face­book cal­en­dar as one of the 5 to import. Now if you RSVP to any events in Face­book, that event will appear in your Google Cal­en­dar and your iPhone.[/update]

At first glance, I assumed that this was related to the hor­ri­ble fires in Vic­to­ria. Nope, just adver­tis­ing. Well done SMH!

Stil­gher­rian takes weekly nom­i­na­tions for “Cnut of the Week”. Tra­di­tion­ally the gong goes to Stephen Con­roy, for his increas­ingly futile attempts to hold back the (largely imag­i­nary) tide of pae­dophiles sweep­ing over the internet.

Unfor­tu­nately I believe this week’s spot has already been claimed. How­ever, I’d like to make an early nom­i­na­tion for next week.

Steve Turner, assis­tant sec­re­tary of the Pub­lic Ser­vice Asso­ci­a­tion of NSW, said … the blame did not lie solely with the Gov­ern­ment as “any com­puter sys­tem can be hacked … even Amer­i­can defence force computers”.

[update 12/2/2009] Nope, there hadn’t been a Stil­gher­rian Live for a while. There is now though, so con­sider this a nomination[/update]

Read­ing the draft Exec­u­tive Order order­ing Guan­tá­namo Bay deten­tion facil­i­ties to be closed, one minor para­graph jumped out at me:

© The indi­vid­u­als cur­rently detained at Guan­tá­namo have the con­sti­tu­tional priv­i­lege of

the writ of habeas cor­pus. Most of those indi­vid­u­als have filed peti­tions for a writ of

habeas cor­pus in Fed­eral court chal­leng­ing the law­ful­ness of their detention.

If that was the entirety of the order, it would be a huge step for­ward for peo­ple still impris­oned there — they’ll be able to force the gov­ern­ment to jus­tify their impris­on­ment, a right that was con­sis­tently denied to David Hicks and the other detainees.

You can read the whole order from a link at the bot­tom of the ACLU’s press release.

You know you’re read­ing a web­site tar­geted at Amer­i­cans when you see phrases like this:

Fire­fox is par­tic­u­larly strong in Europe, the area over which the EU has oversight.