Who would have guessed, a rookie team from Australia whose representatives in the past has never gone as far as the world semi-finals with a blow-up Kangaroo as a mentor would actually come out first-place champions in the Imagine Cup world finals. The awesome part of this story is that I’m actually on that team. w00t.

Naturally when you win something like this, the question you always get is “how did you do it” followed by “no way, seriously, how did you do it” and “when you are rich don’t forget about me”. Now that this web server is alive and kicking, without any further ado, here is how my team and I conquered planet Earth Imagine Cup 2008.

To be perfectly honest, all of this was very close to have not happened at all because of my reluctance to join the competition in the first place. When my teammates asked me to join them back in February I actually declined twice because I thought I was already overloaded and couldn’t contribute much. I guess playing “hard to get” turned out pretty well after all. My teammates would probably have a different opinion on this.

Choosing the topic was almost trivial, the biggest environmental problem in Australia is the lack of water resources. Most people at this stage would probably start to think about households because that’s probably what all the advertisements are saying, “turn off your tap and save the world”. Granted saving water at home is important but there’s no comparison to how much water the agriculture industry uses. Sure, drinking water is not their primary source but the environment is a closed loop and any water resource is precious.

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Photograph credited to PhotoGraham

Oooh, so that’s what the big shiny red button do.

Frequent visitors of this website may have wittingly discovered the somewhat lack of website over the past few weeks. Firstly, I would like to apologize if you were in any way traumatized by the outage.

I was planning to blame Amazon S3 for the downtime but that might be a little unfair because I actually don’t use their service. Blaming other people is always fun.

The slightly more boring truth is that a server software update corrupted the kernel (yes the server runs Linux) whilst I was in Denmark on holiday celebrating my team’s first-prize win in Microsoft’s Imagine Cup world finals in Paris (more about that later). Needless to say the fun I was having outweighed my desire to fix the server. Some of you may have even witnessed the fun I had discovering my inner-Pirate from a placeholder photo in the past couple of days (credit to my Denmark host and server operator for the captions).

Now everything is back to normal, sort of.

Holy cow. If you thought Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate was divine, wait till you see this. A Korean religious goods internet retailer appropriated called “GODpeople Mall” is now selling a version of Microsoft Office 2007 they call the Microsoft Church Package. Below is the ad from their website illustrating the product.

I don’t understand any Korean so I won’t be able to interpret their description of the product which I’m sure makes a lot of sense, but the bible does not seem to come with the package which is a bit of a shame. On the same note, not too sure how Visio fits in the picture. Having said that, the bottom illustration indicates a price discount of an almost sinful 90%.

Having had a quick look on the Microsoft Korea website, I couldn’t find any references to this package so it is my assumption that this has not been officially endorsed but a mere bundle put together by retailer. Smart move nevertheless.

Hello all Internet Explorer blog readers. Welcome. Make yourself at home.

Less than an hour ago, Dean Hachamovitch published a new post on the Internet Explorer blog about “Trustworthy Browsing”. I quickly scanned the article looking for interesting tidbits when I came across an interesting link. “www.somebadsite.com”.

Whilst trying to explain the security improvements Internet Explorer has implemented, Dean used “somebadsite.com” as an example of what a malicious website could not do. Curious like a cat, I clicked the link in anticipation it was a placeholder and would redirect me to Microsoft.com. Then the opportunity struck me like the Phoenix rover found ice. I hastened myself to my domain registrar and got everything sorted out within the minute. Long story short (pun), I am now the proud owner of somebadsite.com which currently redirects here.

In conclusion, Dean, thanks for the link. I owe you one.

P.S. If any person or security company would like to purchase this domain for novelty’s sake or demonstration purposes, I’m open to all charitable donation offers. Please leave a comment or send an email.

Update: As Daniel pointed out in the comments, Dean seems to have removed the hyperlink and my trackback as a direct result of this. I guess my 5 minutes of fame was pretty literal.

When most progress bars try to exaggerate the speed of progress, this is by far the most conservative. In case you were wondering, it does actually fill up full at 99 or 100%. Perhaps instead of a linear algorithm, it’s logarithmic? Go figure.

Microsoft Australia has recently put together an advertising campaign for Windows Vista called “I can do that”. The premise of the campaign I assume is to demonstrate what you can do with Windows Vista, but I’m not too sure about the execution. For example, take a look at this commercial which a variation of has been playing on at least two popular Australian commercial radio stations.

I don’t know about you, but this is quite an annoying advert. At least one other Aussie share the same feeling. It’s downright amateurish and borderline cocky. What little of the end result we see is nothing to be proud of anyway. The kid who plays the director just makes me want to punch fluffy animals. The ad is not engaging, interesting or even informative. If it wasn’t for this, I wouldn’t dare show anyone else.

A related online campaign at one of the radio station’s websites is equally bad. It aims to show the difference between “before” and “after” processing by Windows Live Photo Gallery.

At a glance, it’s basic exposure correction. If you pay more attention, it’s actually also airbrushing the wrinkles on the people’s faces. Something Live Photo Gallery cannot do and obviously post-processed in Adobe Photoshop (check EXIF).

If this is in any way related to the $200 million advertising fund injected into Vista this year then that’s even more disappointing. Maybe try McCann Worldwide instead?