The ANZ bank has a website allowing you to order a new card with a picture on it.  They call it DesignMyCard, but it doesn’t feel much like my card with the terms and conditions being as restrictive as they are.

• trademarks, logos, slogans, company names, get up, copyrighted material or brands of any third party
• advertising or promotional material, or branded products
• celebrities, actors, musicians, sportspeople, cartoons or public figures
• works of art
• phone numbers, addresses, URL addresses, account or PIN numbers
• provocative or sexual material
• violent or other offensive, obscene or indecent material
• nudity or semi-nudity
• bigotry, racism, hatred, profanity or obscenities
• alcohol, tobacco, gambling, firearms or pharmaceutical products
• images that show illegal or anti-social behaviour
• culturally or socially insensitive images
• images that display the opinions or beliefs of political groups, religious groups or socially unacceptable groups (e.g. political images, neo-Nazi images, gangs)
• libellous or defamatory content, or content which is otherwise in violation of any rules, regulations or laws to which the images are subject
• content not acceptable for persons under 18 years old.

In addition to all that, it claims that you can’t upload anything copyrighted, but that excludes every single image, as all works are copyrighted the minute they’re produced, and there’s no provision to submit an alternate license.  There’s also no provision for you uploading your own work.

Most of those I understand, but I’m curious how they define art, and whether they think I’m capable of producing it or not.  In this case, I hope they really hate my picture.  I’m also curious about how they deal with images of public figures which you’ve taken yourself.  As the copyright owner of a picture, there shouldn’t be any issue with publishing it.

I’ve uploaded a pretty good photo, but since they have no way of knowing it’s mine, they’re likely to assume I didn’t take it and reject my submission.  They’d also do that for countless image which carry Creative Commons licenses like those found in WikiPedia.

So what are we left with?  Really terrible holiday pictures?

I certainly hope they’re intrigued enough by my email address to bother hitting this site so they can see the photos really are mine, otherwise I guess I may have to spend my fifteen bucks somewhere else.

I’ll report how it goes when I get confirmation.

I wrote a little code snippit the other day to warn readers about posts further down the page, which may not be safe to have on your screen at work. This was a really simple exercise, but it really bugged me that this short warning message always began with a digit. To me, that just wasn’t reader-friendly enough.

That’s when I got a little carried away, and wrote a function which converts numbers to their fully-expanded written form. I did try to find something built-into PHP to use first, but all I could find to do this was a PEAR module which I wasn’t about to install just so I could do this.

I googled around a bit and found that someone had written a rather long function to achieve what I wanted, but it was so long and painful-looking that even though I’m not much of a coder, I decided to write my own. Well, after getting it to the point where it handles numbers in the hundreds of millions, mine isn’t exactly short either, but it’s about half the length of the one I found.

What it Does

It simply converts numbers into their respective word-forms.  Usage is as follows:

n2w(string $number [, string $format])

The optional format parameter is a single character (either ‘l’, ‘t’ or ‘f’) which tells the function whether you’d like your words in lower case (default), title case, or to capitalise just the first letter.

For example:

n2w('32562798','f');

returns:

Thirty-two million, five hundred and sixty-two thousand, seven hundred and ninety-eight

The function does not output anything, so you will probably want to ‘echo’ its results, unless you plan to process it further.   (continued…)

After running Apache 1.3, PHP 4.3 and MySQL 4.1 for historical compatibility reasons for a long time, I finally decided to rewrite some old code, update some old tools and update the server software to the new branches.  I felt really good about it all until MySQL refused to start.

Those of us who run cPanel on our servers do it because it makes handing out accounts incredibly easy, but unfortunately it also makes you responsible to others which adds a certain amount of urgency and stress to every upgrade.  The last thing you want is for some silly little oversight to break every website on your server.

The upgrade to Apache 2.2 and PHP 5.2 via cPanel’s WHM went extremely well, but for some reason my freshly downloaded MySQL 5.0 simply refused to start, instead throwing out errors all over the place.  That’s really the last thing you need at 04:00, when you’re trying not to screw up other people’s websites.

As it turns out the solution was rather simple.  So simple actually, that it’s pretty disappointing that this hasn’t been addressed by the cPanel folks by now.  After letting cPanel’s WHM do its thing, crack open your favourite SSH client and edit your MySQL configuration file (/etc/my.cnf) and look for a line in the [mysql.server] section that looks like:

[mysql.server]
basedir=/var/lib

You’ll simply want to comment that out, so that it looks like:

[mysql.server]
# basedir=/var/lib

Once you’ve saved that, you can leave the scary console alone and retreat to the relative safety of WHM.  Scroll all the way down to ‘Restart Services’ and give MySQL a good kick in the pants – it should start this time.

As an aside to fellow wordpress users, WP now requires PHP 4.3 at an absolute minimum, but as the PHP folks are no longer supporting the 4.x branch it’s probably a good idea to upgrade sooner rather than later.

Today is ANZAC Day.

While I don’t have a particularly strong national identity, or perhaps because of that, ANZAC Day always leaves me feeling extremely annoyed.  My respect and admiration for troops in general is overshadowed by frustration at the sheer stupidity of a military leadership which would send those troops into a bloodbath by carelessly miscalculating their landing point.

History tends to gloss over the events at Gallipoli by focusing on the bravery of soldiers against insurmountable odds, but I have trouble getting past how senseless it all was.

Australia has a fondness for tales of spectacular failure which I simply do not share.  Instead of honouring the memory of young soldiers, the day makes me angry and disgusted at the wanton waste of their lives by incompetent high-ranking fools.

What makes it worse is that the ANZAC Day march has become a multinational medal-flaunting mardi gras.  Organizers allow the marching of soldiers who fought for other countries in conflicts which didn’t involve Australian troops.

Australia has a very thin culture of its own at the best of times, but now for reasons I cannot understand, we’re expected to dilute the poignance of our most significant national day by honouring soldiers who fought in conflicts which have nothing to do with our country.  I’m all for inclusion and integration but these countries have their own events to memorialise their conflicts.  There’s absolutely no need to include them in ours and confuse an already barely present Australian national identity.

2006 Miss Australia Erin McNaughtrecently attracted some undue attention from conservative grandmothers and other like-minded wowsers.

Erin — whose nickname is ‘McNaughty’ — has been featured in an advertising campaign by wine-maker Cockatoo Ridge. The campaign has caused controversy due to a billboard featuring innuendo playing upon the name of the company.

Apparently it’s the first time an Australian wine label has employed suggestive means to target the younger market. That makes me wonder how stupid wine-makers have to be, to ignore the massive upturn in sales generated by unabashedly sleazy adverts for beer, spirits and pre-mixed beverages.

Interestingly and inexplicably the kerfuffle has centered around verbage rather than cleavage. Here’s the billboard in question:

Yep, that’s all. No tits, no arse, not even a naked shoulder — just an animal-lover expressing her affection for talking birds, or wine, or pirates… Yarrrr.

She loves a cockatoo.

This kind of thing always makes me wonder. With such innocent imagery and a tagline that’s really not overtly sexual in nature, doesn’t it require a relatively dirty mind to draw the requisite links? If you’re enough of a perv to make the connection, how can you possibly be offended by the billboard?

I find it fascinating that people can find the energy to complain about this and chastise Erin for loving cockatoo while our newly-appointed first ever female Governor-General, Quentin Bryce has taken every opportunity in the thousands of interviews she’s given in the last week or so to endear herself to Australia by telling us of her strong connection to outback Queensland.

Over and over, she said:

I have a genuine affection for the bush.

That’s got to be worse than loving a cockatoo, surely. Perhaps nobody is jumping down her throat about it because it’s unacceptable to persecute lesbians? I’d say it’s more likely because she doesn’t inspire quite so much female jealousy.

I wonder how long it’ll be until this generation of old women who have nothing better to do than scan magazines and television looking for something to moan about, just plain drop dead. They’re a blight on humanity not because they complain about ads like this, but because they don’t complain about billboards featuring men with parkas shoved down their jocks.

Erin also deserves a good spanking, but not because of the billboard. She is a nice enough chick, but I wasn’t particularly impressed with her response when asked about the controversy. Here’s an excerpt from an article which quotes her:

“I wasn’t thrilled with what that line was implying,” Erin says. She says the company emailed the slogans to her for approval but it was at the time she was moving to Melbourne [snip] meaning Erin didn’t see them in her inbox until later.

“When I saw the slogans, I tried to stop them using that one but they said it was too late and they were already being printed,” she says. “It was pretty disappointing.”

Oh fuck off Erin. I was totally on your side until you tried on this hypocritical bullshit.

Remember, this is a girl whose nickname is ‘McNaughty’ and who constantly poses for sexy photoshoots for magazines like FHM and the syphilis-ridden crack whore of men’s magazines, ZOO Weekly, which asks such fine interview questions as “What do you prefer, a vibrator or the real thing?”

If she was hoping to portray herself as wholesome and virginal, she should probably not have gone out of her way to forge a sexed-up public image.

I ask you, is this a picture of someone who loves the cock? Don’t decide right now, instead click through and see the rest of the pictures first.

I absolutely embrace her right to flaunt her bee-stings, and I applaud her contribution to male reproductive health, but to feign shock and claim innocence just makes her look like a bloody idiot.   (continued…)