Fascinating story

Give this a read and have a look at the Whirlpool forum while you are at it.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/web/firm-sues-forum-to-silence-critics/2007/09/12/1189276778252.html

Lots if issues. Don't think there is any merit in the suit - the forum contains as many positive comments as it does negative ones so I can't see that they can claim that Whirlpool has deliberately set out to harm the company. The comments also seems to be based on real experiences (impossible to tell) but not from people trying to do anything other than give an opinion. Also interesting to note that the company itself has tried to use the forum to tell their side (not something you would do if you thought the operators of the forum were biased against you or doing you any harm). Anyway, common sense won't have anything to do with the outcome - lets see who has the best lawyers!

Another thought - I've never heard of the company, now by suing Whirlpool, a large number of people like me know of them and think badly of them for picking on a "little guy".

POD

Article in today's Australian (IT Section) worth reading

Follow this link to read about a an IT project that involves lots of $ but is basically just different state police departments sharing their databases - they are using XML to ease the transfer. Conceptually easy but of course - as you are finding out, doing last week's exercises - really quite hard to do. Read about it here http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,22161696-15306,00.html

POD

POD's been sick

Arrghhh, for the second time in 3 weeks I got some sort of tummy bug and I've been sick for the last few days - that means I still have to update the page that will show all the details of the portfolio (Sorry). Look for it late on Monday (sometime after the lecture).

POD

Delay in first lecture recording (with slides)

Podcast lecture 1 is on its way. Sorry its taken me a while - my software, which I just upgraded, is playing up.

POD

Sydney to Melbourne railway.

In the lecture when I was rambling on about infrastructure and trying to illustrate the point that often once standards are set they are hard to undo - I mentioned that Victoria and NSW had different rail gauges, for a long time. That mean't to travel from Melbourne to Sydney you have to change trains at Albury. I said that got fixed around 60 years ago - we'll it was actually a little more recent than that - the direct service between Melbourne and Sydney only started running in 1962! There was a Melbourne to Albury and an Albury to Sydney service from 1883, so you can see, it took a long long time to sort that out!

POD

FIT2027

Just posting to make sure this is OK.