Malta Blogger

2006-01-16T09:45:00.000+01:00

Tech Websites Not Really What They Are?

According to Geek Central, Some "Tech Websites" Are Not What You Think They Are!

An outfit from Malta, yes, Malta, is giving favourable reviews to products from a single corporation - Microsoft of course! Shame on them.
I'll just point you to the article in question. I myself won't be using any products by this Maltese company/companies, thank you very much.

2005-07-29T19:33:00.000+02:00

The Fantastic Four in Malta!!!

I just went to watch the Fantastic Four movie in a Valletta cinema. It was a great experience.
The quality of the print was great. Not too many people watched it, so it was disturbance-free..
I liked the story which was both character-based and action-packed. I left feeling satisfied, nothing was left out which needed to be there. The movie was about persons, family (a dysfunctional one too) and friendship. There were negative reviews on the Internet, but thankfully I ignored them. For me this was a comic book movie done right (like X-Men/X-Men 2. I almost wrote Smallville but that isn't a movie).

I enjoyed seeing Stan Lee's cameo in the Baxter Building, the FF's HQ. Stan Lee if you didn't know is the genius behind the 60's Marvel Comics including the X-Men and Fantastic Four. Usually he gets nice little cameos in all the Marvel Comics movies, and this was no exception.

Victor Von Doom (Dr Doom) thought he was God like some of us do sometimes. He was wrong.
Reed Richards took too much time to make life's decisions and this cost him.. But in the end he
made the right choices. I wonder, do we make the right choices ourselves in our lives?

2005-07-25T15:25:00.000+02:00

Government Malta Inland Revenue Website Problems

I was using the government's Inland Revenue Website. At least it doesn't use flash so that's more usable for all.
However, the webmasters don't seem to be aware of popular new browsers such as Mozilla Firefox (there's not a reference to it, there's a reference and a photo of Netscape.. oh well) - though it works ok with it.

The online income tax calculator which I had to use because the IRD forgot to send me the income tax form (then they sent it late, but they sent it without the booklet still!) and booklet, well it's got some bugs. It hasn't been tested. Or it hasn't been tested properly.

It allows you to enter ridiculous amounts, even negative figures. One would have imagined that the programmers would know how to do this if they had been at University studying some programming course...
But even though you enter whatever figures you enter, the calculator always says that you owe the department tax! As much as I tried, I could never get it to tell me that they 'owed' me (fictitious) tax ('tax' overpaid).

After the fun, I used it with proper figures and it worked well. But those checks for extreme values are missing. They could be done even by some javascript...
Also there's an online tax declaration form (not the entire one, just the one they send you a month before to declare that you haven't earned much so you won't fill in the real return form) which is a year out of date (they forgot to update it).
Can you update the site folks?

2005-07-11T08:40:00.000+02:00

Michele Peresso's Miper

Michele Peresso Ltd has a gift scheme called Miper. It was thrown (spammed) in many households' letter boxes this week.

Funnily enough, it tells you it is copyrighted, it cannot be copied, transferred to a retreival system, or transmitted in any way.

In other words just writing about it might be 'illegal', or even throwing it away might be illegal as it would be a form of transmission to the dustbin. Giving it to someone else is definitely an offence against Michele Peresso. You'd think this would be a work of art with that clause. But it isn't. It's a badly produced small booklet, a fairly ugly model gracing the cover and pathetic artwork that nobody would save, let alone copy!

Who gave Michele Peresso the right to spam via junk mail?

I refuse to accept 'conditions' set by spammers, hence I'm writing about it.
Why does Peresso think that it is something likely to be copied? It's an advert for heaven's sake.
Wouldn't giving the booklet to somebody interested in it likely to help Peresso?
Apparently not.

I almost feel like phoning Peresso for the permission to throw it away or to draw doodles on it.
We do, in this country, get ridiculous sometimes - and this is right up that alley.

2005-07-06T15:04:00.000+02:00

Software Patents Law Defeated in EU

This is great news.

If the law had passed, software developers would no longer own what they write and could be sued for selling or distributing their own software. This would not only endanger your job, but the entire European software sector.

Many websites protested against this law, and protests were held in Brussels and Strasburg.
Let's hope now this vote is respected... and that the issue doesn't crop up in future once more.

2005-07-05T16:28:00.000+02:00

National Cinema Day! Hooray!

Last Saturday was national cinema day in Malta.
Fantastic! The admission price goes down to Lm 1.30 for that day only, of course.
The cinema becomes very popular on that day. Then the next day it's back to the usual high prices.
But they didn't show Fantastic Four, they kept that for full price...
Then we wonder why cinema is not that popular, I mean it could be more popular but the prices are steep and for a usual visit to the cinema for two persons you could buy the original DVD with all the extras you don't get at the cinema... When will they understand? Why not give something connected to the movie when you go to the cinema? That would attract some people perhaps..

2005-06-28T17:20:00.000+02:00

Blogging the day before a holiday..

A very tricky thing to do. I've been busy so I didn't update..
Yet here's an update. Tomorrow is the feast of St Peter and St Paul, Il-Luminarja or the feast of light. Not just that, but it's a public holiday so everyone gets a day off!

2005-06-22T14:54:00.000+02:00

Linus, the man who invented Linux (or its kernel anyway) talks about the deterioration of Microsoft in an interview in the Good Morning Silicon Valley blog.

Basically he says that Microsoft will not be replaced by another monopoly. Companies like Microsoft (and we have the equivalent here like Maltacom etc) begin to take themselves for granted.

He says "companies just don't tend to stay on top forever -- they become irrelevant either because of their own missteps or because their market just isn't the "happening thing" any more. You can only skate the cutting edge for so long.

So the question is how the decline happens, and in what timeframe. Will open source be a factor? Almost certainly. Will it be the factor? I don't know."

The clock's ticking, I say. More and more are realising that Microsoft is not the only way. It's not the only OS and not the only provider of a word processor in the world. Those of us who refuse to keep feeding the beast can switch to OpenOffice, an open source office suite.
Hopefully the government in Malta will wake up and smell the coffee rather than keep promoting just Microsoft. Let's promote open source too. Let's give students FREE copies of Linux and OpenOffice (not just copies of Office XP and Windows XP for Lm 10) so they can learn how to use advanced operating systems, not just click here and there like idiots who can't understand a thing about what they are trying to do.

2005-06-21T22:06:00.000+02:00

Why are Maltese shops so terrible?

Go to buy something, you'll find it's been lying there for ages. It's either something lying in a shop window, gaining dust and becoming yellow due to the sunshine (and we have a lot of that), or it's old technology still being sold at yesterday's prices. I mean you can shop online and get a cheaper deal within the EU... Even if you want to buy a DVD, it's often cheaper to get it from websites like Amazon.co.uk than to get it from D'Amato or Exotique.
The prices are often twice as expensive at the local shops I mentioned, and you can't find anything different from standard hollywood fare and little else. Try to get a tv show dvd box set. You will get strange looks. Once I saw a Smallville box set in a shop window in Sliema. But Amazon UK had a cheaper deal, so I got it from them instead and you order and pay everything online including VAT (no need to hassle at the customs or post office now we are EU members).
Sigh.

Try to get a good digital camera, you might find a shop which tells you 'sorry we don't stock that model'. It's cheaper if you get it from abroad too.
Try to get a digital projector of some famous brand, you might find a shop (the agent of that famous brand) that tells you 'we don't sell that anymore, buy some other brand instead'.

Why bother.. indeed. It seems that recently our shops have become hopeless. They aren't selling much stuff, so what they have becomes old (especially for technological products including cameras and computer stuff).
I haven't mentioned how some other shops foist bad quality merchandise on unsuspecting customers...

Forgot to say that I found also that D'Amato has some good prices on Cd's. In particular you can find italian cd's which are not that easy to buy online at the moment. And Malta cd's of course.

2005-06-21T21:49:00.000+02:00

This is my first post in a blog.. I'm hoping that this will be an interesting read.

This blog will be about malta, that island in the mediterranean... anything interesting happening here, my thoughts, etc etc..

Malta has an impressive history. It joined the EU in May 2004.
Onto the present...