I just noticed this the other day, the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation to those people from the states) have re-worked the News section of their site.

The first and most important thing I noticed was that the News was actually there! For example, I heard on the radio this morning that there was an incident involving our opposition leader and a strip club in New York while he was a little shin dig for the UN (wont someone think of the children??). Apparently a statement had been released but there wasn’t any explanation about what the substance of that statement was, jump on to the website and there is the article, posted a whole 24min ago.

I also wanted to know what happened to that passenger jet from Turkey that was hijacked. A quick click on World and then the fantastic tagging system at the top of the page and I found the article. Once in the article I could see all of the related stories so I could back-track through each of the updates.

There are also a bunch of Web2.0 (if I can use that term) features that include a personal list of tags for new stories that are applicable to you, and a personal stash of Articles (like internal bookmarks). Combine that with a lack of advertising, a smattering of new media and the tagging system for navigation and we have a winning site. Of course this is all government funded so check it out and subscribe to the RSS feed, public interest will help ensure the future of this great service and the ABC in general.

News Home: http://abc.net.au/news/

Yay!! I didn’t believe it when I first heard it, but apple has released a public beta of the soon-to-be Windows version of Safari.

First impressions are really quite good, here are a few of the highlights:

Quartz font rendering.

It just looks sweet, using the same font rendering as available on OS X. I love my fonts, and I love seeing them displayed without the hinting (that modifies the shape of the letters to better fit the pixels) combined with the secret sauce that manages to make things not too blury.

Aqua widgets

Rather than go through the rather lengthy process of porting the application to an alternate toolkit, Apple ported their toolkit to Windows, which is good “˜cause it means us Microsoft ppl can get a bit of a taste of the Mac world.

Thin Borders

I know it sounds lame, but one of the things I love about Macs is the way that everything is presented on the screen. The application just sits there with no borders; you just use the resize option at the bottom-left of the window to do the needful. Vista on the other hand looks terrible, with great chunky borders that attempt to show off how well the glass theme works. As a result, the shadows don’t seem to make the windows float like they should, it’s a small thing I know, but it’s the small things that make a big difference.

We can test!

Being a fan of accessibility and cross-browser compatibility, I am really really happy that this is happening. I can actually see how the site will look on a Mac! That is complete with the same font rendering, DPI settings, etc. It’s really handy.

The frustrating things:

I can’t get it to work on my machine at work.

I think I must have had some dodgy version of the “Lucida Grande” font that has caused Safari to start off without any text being displayed. Kind of a downer. I have attempted to replace these problematic fonts with the correct ones, but I have still had no success. I hope Apple will be able to do something about this “˜cause I am keen to use it.

My laptop touchpad scroll doesn’t work

Which is rather annoying. I assume it has something to do with the lack of integration with the underlying OS, both a good and a bad thing I guess.

We will potentially have another browser that we need to support.

Yeah, I know that I said it’s great to able to test on a new browser, but it will be a pain when we can no longer say “well, it’s not perfect on Safari, but that’s only 1.5% of the market so that’s acceptable”. I do think that the browser share will increase considerably with this move to be something more significant, and that will mean another Javascript DOM to accommodate for and another set of CSS curiosities to consider.

Download the beta here: http://www.apple.com/safari/

This might not sound like a big deal, but Brisbane and a lot of South East Queensland is currently dry as a bone. Actually, we are really quite screwed.

Everyone has been watching every drop that goes down the drain. We have buckets in the shower so that we can still water our herbs and chilli plants. The car has gone unwashed for months and months. We are trying to run the dishwasher only once a week. We have been encouraged to keep our water consumption down to 140L / day, sounds like a lot, but go a minute or two over the allocated 3 in the shower and it starts to become rather difficult.

So, water was a major election issue for Premier Beattie and it will be for the Federal government when it comes time for little Johnny to defend his position. The Federal government has already stepped in, trying to get the Northern NSW government to setup pipes to take water from some of the better off areas to help support Brisbane. There is also a national water grid going in that will take water from some of the other dams in the surrounding regions for Brisbane, and some desalination plants going up.

All sounds good eh? Well, not really, I’m not overly convinced that it will be in here enough. We only have about 15 months left of water if we keep going at the current rate. Our population is also increasing at about 1700 people a month, which will put further strain on our resources.

The rain is just divine, nothing nicer than listening to it while going to sleep and I just love it when it is cold (not really cold, Brisbane cold). Unfortunately this particular fall is only enough to extend the 15 month deadline by 2 days.

Some more links about the situation:

• SEQ Brisbane Dam Levels
• Brisbane City Council drought information
• Details on Level 5 restrictions, Level 6 kick in as we approach September.