ajfisher

From mobile data to broadband and open-source adoption, Australia's tech scene feels stuck compared to Europe.

A site launch brings equal parts exhaustion, relief and adrenaline, and it's a feeling shared across all engineering disciplines.

The TorrentSpy case is another skirmish in the MPAA's war on file sharing, but the lawsuits only spur new tools.

jQuery is a joy to use, but a few missing pieces still hurt productivity.

A client nearly derailed a simple SMS donation idea after being dazzled by more advanced services.

Loading external XML in XSLT on .NET is harder than it should be.

PCI DSS compliance makes sense in theory, but for small merchants it becomes an expensive, confusing audit industry.

QNAP NAS boxes are Linux-based but reboot to a clean state, so custom cron jobs disappear.

The HMRC data loss scandal shows how weak government data practices and contractor incentives can be.

SQL makes logic easy for developers, however it also creates boundary issues when it comes to sales price matching.

The OLPC project finally delivered the $100 laptop, but availability is frustratingly limited.

Google's new mobile OS feels like a missed opportunity to support existing open-source platforms such as OpenMoko.

CSS files are flat and verbose, forcing ever-longer selectors just to get specificity.

Folding@home hitting a petaflop shows the power of distributed computing, especially with consoles in the mix.

Another moral panic around games misses the real issue of parenting and supervision.

A client request for a simple, maintainable slideshow led to a jQuery-based fade sequence instead of Flash.

jQuery's selector engine brings CSS-like power to JavaScript and solves real-world layout problems without littering HTML with extra classes.

Buying a Wii for Wii Sports felt odd, but the shared play time quickly justified the cost.

The DRM arms race punishes legitimate buyers who just want to use media across their devices.

Blue Gene L can barely simulate half a mouse brain, a reminder of how far we are from human-scale neural models.

An IE peekaboo bug turns a simple hover effect into a disappearing page and exposes how hard CSS bugs are to search for.

A simple moment watching a friend discover the mouse scroll wheel highlights how much tech literacy we take for granted.

CSS is powerful but painfully repetitive, especially when themes require the same colours and borders to be retyped everywhere.

Using fuzzy logic can create significantly better customer experiences.

Years of loyalty to Nokia is being tested by a string of buggy phones and poor support, culminating in an N73 that crashes during calls.