The Prime Minister, Immigration Minister, and Minister for Defence had announced to the nation that some asylum seekers in a ship trying to approach Australia from the north had thrown some of their own children overboard to force the Australian navy to rescue them, and hence take them onto Australian soil (where they would be granted additional legal rights). About a week later some photos were released, claiming to show the events, and it was claimed that video footage of the event existed as well.

The problem of course was that it never happened.

It appears as though miscommunication caused the false information to quickly rise up through the chain of command, and then was quickly released by the Ministers (who were in the middle of an election campaign where people smuggling was a big issue). The northern regional commander called the captain of the HMS Adelaide while they were boarding the suspected illegal entry vessel. The captain was distracted and told his superior that the refugees were threatening to throw children overboard. This got misinterpreted.

The photos and video were actually of the ship sinking 1 day later.

The scandal was not really that the wrong information was released (although why something so provocative was released with no written record of the event is an issue), but that no one from the government bothered to fix the record until The Australian published it a month later.

The book follows the events based on the discoveries of two Senate committee enquiries (which were controlled by the opposition). It seems to lay blame in a number of areas.

Firstly, the Chief of Defence Force, Admiral Chris Barrie, seems to have ignored the contrary evidence for a long period of time, and refused to change the official advice to the government. He insisted that he would back the captain's version of events until presented with compelling evidence that it was false. Of course the caption's version of events was that it never happened...

Secondly the Prime Minister's Department, and the Department of Defence did not ever formally pass word that the events never happened onto the appropriate Ministers' offices. While some informal chats took place, they didn't seem to place enough emphasis on what really happened.

Thirdly a lot of blame is placed on the Ministers and their offices. Their staff were definitely told informally what happened, but they decided to ignore the 'informal chats' probably because it would have been bad politics to publicly withdraw the claims in the middle of the election campaign. Thus the Prime Minister could claim to have been acting on advice and go on defending the claims based on the advice he had been given. The Ministers in turn never bothered following up on the evidence (or lack thereof) because it was convenient not to know.

Where the book really challenges things though is towards the end when examining how the Senate committee was forced to operate. In the federal Parliament in Australia, the Senate is frequently controlled by a composition of opposition parties, and so most enquiries occur there. However, Senate committees have no power to compel any member of the House of Representatives to testify before them (and none ever do). All the Ministers in this case were members of the House. Thus the committee could not question them about what actually happened (and question time in Australia is more of a farce than in New Zealand so that doesn't help matters).

In addition though, it has long been held that Senate committees do not have the power to call the staff in the Minister's private office either, as they have been long held to be an extension of the Minister themselves. The then Clerk of the Senate disputed that, but neither major party actually wants to challenge that ruling.

Patrick Weller's point is that the Ministerial staff become effectively accountable to no-one. They hold a lot of power unofficially, but can't be held to account for their actions. These days some private offices are extremely large, and so the old fiction of the staffers simply being an extension of the Minister is no longer true. While their Ministers are theoretically accountable for their actions, in practice this doesn't happen. Ministers very rarely resign these days for failings by the private office staff.

From reading this, it seems to me that more checks are required. I don't see why Senate committees should not be able to call the staff in the Minister's office before a relevant enquiry. Particularly when it is the Senate who performs most enquiries, and the fact that most Ministers are from the House (and so have immunity). An alternative would be to permit members of the executive to be called before committees of both houses. But either way I think the Parliament must be able to hold the executive to account more effectively.

Weller ends with a quote from Winston Churchill when told of the loss of Singapore in World War II: "I did not know, I was not told, I should have asked."

The Patriots are looking to make history by being the first team ever to go 19-0 in a season, beating the previous best of the '72 Dolphins who went 18-0. And if Tom Brady (Patriot's QB) plays well, I don't see anything that the Giants do being able to stop them.

Having said that, I would actually prefer the Giants to win. They had a bad start to the season, losing their first two games quite badly, but had a great comeback. In addition, they pushed the Patriots to a very close game only a month ago at the end of the regular season.

In addition, I quite like Eli Manning's style (the Giants QB). It's only his forth season, and the whole time he has been compared to his older brother Peyton Manning (who won the SuperBowl for the Colts last year) and father Archie Manning (another Pro-Bowler).

Of course the SuperBowl is often known just as much for the ridiculously expensive adverts that run through it (about US$2.5 million for a 30-second spot) and the half-time show.

Anyway, hopefully it will be a good game, as it's the last decent football game for a while.

Of course its a little painful when you first install your computer as seemingly everything needs to be elevated, but once that's done it's much less of a problem.

Part of this user access control functionality is that the program files directory (generally C:\Program Files) can no longer be written to by applications (unless explicitly run as administrator). If an application tries to write to this location, it instead ends up writing to a location within the user's profile instead (something like C:\Users\Dave\AppData\VirtualStore\Program Files). This is supposed to be completely transparent to the program in question - it thinks it is writing to C:\Program Files, and can successfully reload the files again afterwards.

Up until yesterday this had worked fine for me with no problems whatsoever. I had run all our applications and catalogued all instances where they incorrectly try to write to the program files directory, to ensure that we fix them in the near future. All seemed well.

Then one of our applications suddenly stopped working on my machine (and just on my machine). It was failing with an error trying to load one of our DLLs, which was located in the application directory. Bizarre. The application directory is the FIRST place that Windows looks when loading DLLs.

So I thought, maybe that DLL is missing a dependency instead. I opened up Dependency Walker and tried to open the DLL. It couldn't find the file at all. In fact it thought that the entire application directory was empty. So I tried with OleView and got exactly the same result.

It turned out that file virtualization was busted. There was an empty directory in the virtual store program files with the same name as my application directory. When Dependency Walker, OleView, and my application were run, they seemed to see only this empty directory, instead of getting a merged view of both that directory, and the real program directory.

Consequently the application couldn't find its DLLs, and so failed to load miserably. Deleting the directory under the virtual store fixed the problem, and everything worked again. I tried creating the directory manually in the virtual store, and again things stopped working.

So it appears as either there is a bug in file virtualization so that it fails to merge the directories correctly in some cases, or alternatively there is a way to toggle how this works but I was unable to find it (and I searched for quite a while).

Ultimately I rolled back to a system restore point and things worked correctly again.

Anyone know how to report bugs to Microsoft these days? This is without getting charged for a support call of course?

Eventually Tom Brady is going to retire and you'll be left with a tattoo of a team that's no longer any good.

For those not into American Football, the New England Patriots (with the logo above) play the San Diego Chargers this weekend in the AFC Championship game, with the winner advancing to the Super Bowl.

Anyway, so I got a new Dell OptiPlex 755 with a Core 2 Duo CPU, and a few gigs of RAM. And of course Windows Vista.

I hadn't used Vista previously, so I was interested to see how well it worked, and whether it really was as annoying as has been indicated.

In general, I really like it.

• Aero looks really cool (yes Linux has had that for years, but who cares).


• There have been a ton of really nice improvements in all the standard UI components (e.g. Explorer).


• I love the new start menu. I tend to install a ton of software on my computer and struggle to keep my start menu organised. Now I don't even try. Just hit the Windows button and type the first couple of characters of the application and it finds it.


• Windows Update is at last integrated with the OS.


• The Vista gadgets bar is a vast improvement on their last attempt with Active Desktop.

Anyway, the feature I expected to give me the most trouble was User Access Control (UAC). This is the annoying dialog that gets you to confirm a lot of actions. While setting up my machine I encountered this ALL the time and it annoyed me a lot. However, once I had my machine setup, it hasn't really been a problem at all, and in fact has saved me multiple times.

I'm not an Administrator on my machine for two reasons. Firstly, it provides some protection against rogue applications and my mistakes (as they don't have sufficient privileges to cause lasting harm), and secondly, to ensure that the software I write works if you aren't an Administrator (and I've found and fixed a number of issues by doing that). Generally I only require confirmation for an action about once per day, which is about the same as when I was running Linux regularly.

However, I do of course have a number of minor problems / gripes:

• Why does Vista create the default user account as an Administrator, but still prompt to confirm actions? This seems to be a contradiction - if someone is an Administrator, they shouldn't need to confirm everything. I'd much rather all users were normal users, and had to have explicit elevation of privilege to do anything important.


• I have Windows Update set to notify when there are new updates available - instead of downloading and installing them automatically (because it always seems to want to restart in the middle of an overnight test). However, I don't receive those notifications when running as a regular user. I have to explicitly check Windows Update to see if there are new updates. This of course is a security issue. If my wife gets a new laptop, I'll set her up as a regular user, and it could be months between administrative logins... plenty of time for security issues to arise.


• Windows Explorer's new overwrite option dialog can't handle multiple monitors. It always wants to display in the middle of the primary monitor, even if the Explorer window is on the secondary. It gets really confusing when it appears behind another window on another monitor...


• I've had two bluescreen crashes after resuming from hibernation. These don't get reported back to Microsoft unless you then login as an administrator. My next login as an admin might be some time away...


• You can't launch a copy of Windows Explorer running as the Administrator when logged in as a regular user.


• Visual Studio 2005's command line compiler doesn't work on Vista unless it is run with administrative privileges. Okay, this is problem not the Vista teams' fault. But it is a real pain in the ass. I understand that I can't use it to debug any process on the system if I'm not the administrator, but all I want is to compile some code in a directory that I have write access to, which compiles fine through the IDE.

But in general, I quite like it. Hopefully the service pack irons out a few of these problems.

A fairly impressive mandate due to a 6% swing against the government. Newspapers on both sides of the Tasman are going on about Rudd's mandate and how it has set him up for several terms in power.

However, there has not been much of an examination of the Senate. The current Senate, which will continue sitting as is until 1 July 2008, is controlled by the Coalition who hold 39 of the 76 seats. Even after the new Senators take their seats, it appears that the Coalition will still hold 37 seats based on the votes counted at present (the voting system used in the Senate is ridiculously complicated and so final results take some time). In addition, Family First, a socially conservative party, hold another Senate seat.

This is going to make Rudd's legislative agenda rather complicated. While they will no doubt get through their Work Choices changes as there seems to be a clear mandate for that, other things may be somewhat harder.

It is very unlikely that the Coalition will attempt to block the budget as they did in 1975, I would not be terribly surprised if we have a double dissolution sometime in the next 18 months.

The first is Paul Potts, who is a cell-phone salesman / amateur opera singer.

It's not often that an Opera singer will bring a crowd of all ages to their feet.

The second is a 6-year old girl called Connie Talbot. And while she is very cute, her amazing voice is why she has made the final.

I've never actually served on a jury, but I would like to, to see how it really operates. However, unless I become an Australia citizen, I'm unlikely to anytime in the near future.

I have been summoned 3 times in New Zealand, but the first time was during my final uni exams (and so was excused easily). The second time I was summoned to the Palmerston North High Court, but I had moved to Auckland several weeks earlier (but less than the month required before you can update your electoral role details), and so they gave me a 12 month exemption - not sure why, I only asked to not have to serve in Palmerston North.

The final time was for a trial to be held during my honeymoon. Again, they excused me, but I wouldn't have gone regardless :-)

In none of these cases though, did they ever ask for any evidence for my claims. This does lead me to wonder how many people are excused for fabricated reasons.

It's unclear from the article whether the 10% who have shown up in recent weeks in Auckland are 10% of those originally summoned (and so most of the others have been excused), or 10% of those expected to show up. Maybe the courts need to crack down harder on those who just ignore the summons - from what I recall, it is an offense not to turn up, but the fine is rather insignificant, so is not much of a deterrent.

The apartment was a large 2 bedroom apartment, with a reasonably sized balcony, and a large living area. And of course the complex had the obligatory pool, spa, sauna, and gym.

We spent the Saturday wandering around Surfers, going to Infinity (difficult to describe, but a special efforts experience that you walk through), and of course went up to the Q1 Observation Deck at the top of the tallest apartment building in the world (20th tallest building).

This is looking north from Q1 over Surfers Paradise beach, towards South Port (and SeaWorld).

Here's some of the canal system around Surfers at sunset.

On the Sunday we went to SeaWorld since none of us had been for about 3 years. Since we last visited they have added the 'SeaWorld Eye' (small version of the London Eye), which gives some good views of both the theme park, and the surrounding area.

This is looking back towards Surfers Paradise from SeaWorld. The Q1 building is clearly visible.

And here is part of SeaWorld itself.

All in all, it was a good weekend trip. The next one will probably be up towards Noosa on the Sunshine Coast.

Hat Tip: Half Done

This is a great development for political junkies like me who need an excuse to not work...

I haven't actually got around to going along to the State Parliament while it is in session as yet, and if the online video is fairly good I probably won't be going anytime soon either.

I have no problem with this in principle as former long-serving MPs tend to still be involved in a number of official events, and frankly, $200,000/year is a very small amount compared with the state's GDP of around $160,000m.

However, I do have a problem with some of the details of how it is implemented.

Firstly, this is the first time that is has ever been disclosed, and even now, only the total figure is provided. This is public expenditure, and I see no reason why we shouldn't be told exactly who of the former MPs is using it. Speaker Mike Reynolds claims that revealing this would expose "private citizens" to "public ridicule". Frankly, that is ridiculous. If they are abusing it, then public ridicule should definitely follow, and if they are only using it for official business, why is there a problem?

This leads on to the second problem. At present there is no requirement for any reason or justification to be provided for this travel. This is a much more serious concern (but would be alleviated by making the expenditure breakdown public) as under no circumstances should the State be subsidising any business trips made by former MPs. An argument could be made for funding some personal trips, but the State should not be subsidising businesses via the backdoor, by reducing their travel expenses if they have hired ex-MPs.

Oops.

Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, if you missed it you can see it below: